Happy Birthday, ReciclaGEM!

Bom dia, boa tarde, boa noite my readers (depending on your hemisphere).

About one hour ago EST, the idea of "ReciclaGEM" turned four. Four years ago, to this day, in the beautiful and artistically distressed (like Diesel jeans) neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn, I was given the task of creating a "vegan fashion show" for my dear friend, Amanda Perez's event Vegan Jam, an event that celebrated hip hop, multiculturalism, and veg-friendly living. More than just avoiding animal by-products, I wanted to create a fashion collection using one of the greatest waste resources in the United States- clothing and textiles.

They have filled these landfills, polluted oceans around the world, destabilized local economies, and have been justified by many as the consequences of the fickle fashion cycle. But they are also the very material that, if reclaimed, could reduce a downward spiral of the United States becoming the energetic black hole of the Americas and the world.

The collection, showcased on that sun-charred rooftop of that artist collective in Brooklyn, was inspired by the Gulf BP oil spill, and as a vegan would consider, the perspective of the animals who perished in a man-made mistake.

The fashion show featured many fantastic models, who embodied from gait to gaze the emotions of such fallen creatures. And that day, I had the honor of collaborating with an amazing photographer who would continue to be one of my central collaborators, Katherine Soutar.

Katherine Soutar is a Melbourne-based photographer who, at the time, lived in New York and photographed many an artist and performer with her signature emotive and stylistic precision. In 2010, she created these beautiful, dynamic portraits of incredible models who embodied the narrative.

And four years later, our collaborations have continued in the form of a Frida Kahlo and Josephine Baker inspired project (to be revealed shortly), and the photographing of my look book for Fall 2014, Bricolage.
We drove to an abandoned, dried up swamp hours from Melbourne City in the small town of Willaura to a plot of land accompanied by nothing but dried bones and mud to address a collection that also, ironically enough, explored the very post-apocalyptic destruction that the earlier Gulf oil spill, and many environmental political events after, seemed to suggest.

The land was supernatural, almost as if Wangechi Mutu's mind spat forth the animation of "The End of eating Everything" into the soil of Willaura, Australia. The sky was grey, the algae rose-tinted, and the sky scratching the surface of what is to come, what has already come.

(All photos by Katherine Soutar)

Perhaps the director of 1980s cult classic, Mad Max, had left the vestiges of a movie set 34 years old. Or perhaps the earth is trying to tell us something.

In either case, before the actual End of eating Everything, we can continue to collaborate, to grow, and to learn from one another, take roadtrips with brilliantly minded friends and create a work that translates what the earth has been trying to tell us for so long.

We didn't just speak with the earth that day. We conversed with her.  This roadtrip, these images, these words are the silent moments between words that we left for her to speak back.

T*

To see more of Kat's photography work, check out her wedding photography company, It's Beautiful Here, co-created with Scout Kozakiewicz, and await her forthcoming website, showcasing exclusively to her years of photo artistry such as this.

And here's a flash back to our two year birthday....

Artist Highlight: Johannes Zits

 

("Embodying Nature: Relating to Geography")

Boa tarde, my readers,

It is only fitting that I follow the workshop on Fashion and Embodiment with a series of posts that highlight artists who are addressing those very subjects. For while fashion is a word we are all familiar with, embodiment is the very essence that we are talking about.

And one of such artists is Johannes Zits, Toronto-based but globally prolific, who engages the subjects of embodiment, textiles, and garments in ways that extend beyond the word "fashion" but, in the words of my dear friend and muse, Randal Jacobs, become "high concept."

I first met Johannes in the lobby of SESC-Vila Mariana of São Paulo after watching him, day by day, over the course of the Hemispheric Institute's Encuentro conference, shred his suit jacket to pieces and weave it into a loin cloth.

 

This loin cloth then became revived once again as the embodied action in the trees of the Praça Roosevelt in São Paulo, similar to another performance  "I'm not slim." which he staged in Callejon de Mesones, "a gentrified section" in Centro Histórico, Mexico City.



These pieces  represent but a myriad of ways that he has engaged art viewer and audience in subtle engagements facilitated through the interaction of his body with the environment, urban, natural, remote, gentrified, diverse, provincial- environments are ripe with connotations and opportunities for activist engagement.

What dare I say of this praxis??

A lot. Johannes has been practicing for two decades. His work has explored via his material surroundings subjectivity, corporeality, nudity and cloth. Cloth is a language through which he paints narratives of discourse, some pre-defined, others, open to the reinterpretation and re-envisioning of the viewer. The narratives are then recommunicated through the media of photography, live installations, performances, videos, actions, and last but certainly not least, textile bricolage.

Similar to El Anatsui, some of his work involves recycled materials because of his sheer interest in the medium and the performance of reinterpretation instead of an explicit environmentalist statement. Nonetheless, because of his intimate connection with the material, whether the re-envisioned fabric scrap, nature or his nude body in concert with these natural and reclaimed materials, his work still illuminates, perhaps inadvertently, questions of consumption, excess, and human living that either is amenable or sharply contrasts that of the natural earth.

("Re-Dressing Landscape")

While in Toronto for Fashion Art Toronto earlier this year, an event at which he also presented, I had the amazing opportunity to meet with Johannes in his beautiful studio  and view some of the latest textile works that inform much of his performance.

"The Marriage Quilt"

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Bricolage is a powerful medium to re-engage the mind on the power of embodiment.

Inspired by artists such as Johannes Zits, El Anatsui, Jean Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, and Wangechi Mutu, among many others, I move foward with my ever evolving environment-inspired line, ReciclaGEM, through the crafting of my Fall 2014 Collection, entitled "Bricolage," created with the vision of reclaiming the discarded of our environment to become re-aquainted with it.

That is what Johannes and such artists have done in art and performance, and that is what I hope also do in fashion, with the worlds of performance, art and fashion being in symbiotic and consistent conversation with one another.

Peace, love, and embodiment,
T*

Sin Maiz No Hay Vida | Without Corn There is No Life-Protest + Action + Fashion Collection

If you are connected with me on instagram (@reciclagem), you would have traveled with me to the  Fall 2013 Haute Couture Fashion Week halls and atelier interiors in Paris, where I learned couture pleating techniques, embroidery, and draping in Paris, France.

You would have also traveled with me as I flew from the apple trees of Sablé-sur-Sarthe, to the cobblestone of San Cristóbal de las Casas, where I, alongside 40 other activists, artivists, scholars, and revolutionaries debated, protested, and marched in the name of social visibility, land rights, and the right to live without GM.

When we arrived to San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, we were presented with a problem. Monsanto, the creators of the genocidal machine Agent Orange and the company responsible for the  bulk of genetically modified foods in the U.S. food supply chain, is looking at Mexico as its next market, and in particular, Mexican corn.

Why is this bad (well, if you're reading this blog, then I'm sure you have your own ideas)? But in my humble and newly informed opinion, this is bad for a gamut of reasons from GM's being proven to cause cancer to destroying local economies, to taking over a crop that is, from its very origins within the Mayan creation story, the ORIGINS OF LIFE!

So, led by artist and activist Jesusa Rodriquez, and digital activist/prankster Jacques Servin of the Yes Men, and alongside the actors/activists of Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya and actors/activists of Yuyachkani, we explore how to use our bodies, and the refasioning of our bodies to raise awareness in San Cristóbal, and Mexico worldwide, of Monsanto's impending next move.

We took on the streets, in naturally dyed pigments, fabric, food scraps, as two theatrical sides: HUMANITY/ People of the Corn and a re-fashioned interpretation of the corporate beast, Monsanto.

(Photo Credits: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, Lorie Novak, Lisandra Ramos-Grullón, Silvia Serrano, and Diana Taylor)

 

 

 

 

 We succeeded in drawing a great crowd in the Plaza de la paz y la resistencia, a plaza at the center of the city where such actions often take place, and sought to settle this Humanity vs. Monsanto debate in the most fair way as possible: a dodge ball game. Each side enlisted help from the crowd, with only the side of Humanity achieving, and in the end...fairly and squarely, Humanity/The People of the Corn won, and most importantly, the very person who won the game was a young woman from the area who just happened to join in. In this act, we brought hypervisibility to an all too pressing issue, but most critically we succeeded in dialoguing with quite a number of children who may not know the politics of GM, but knew that "Monsanto is bad because they are trying to take the corn." 

 

 

 

This visual / aesthetic /refashioned action was accompanied by a digital one, where members of the collective, Sin Maíz No Hay Vida, created a false website impersonating Monsanto and declaring pre-emptively what they were seeking to keep hidden within their boardrooms. And the company responded accordingly---> What does this mean? We as the people are letting them know we are watching.

In this overly chemicalized world, what can we do? Where do we stand? Continuing the conversation from an transnational to a hemispheric to a GLOBAL level so that Humanity DOES win in the end? How? By electing organic, staying active in our food and FABRIC consumption, making our governments and the multinational corporations listen while making sure that everyone in our lives is informed, conscious, and equipped to make the best nourishment and consumer decisions they can through  various platforms, whether it be blogs or fashion collection presentations to spread the awareness.

And so, on September 10th, 2013, I will be presenting ReciclaGEM by Tamara Leacock's Spring 2014 collection, Sin Maiz No Hay Vida, inspired by the aesthetic act that took place at the Plaza de la Resistencia, inspired by the questions of culture, appropriation, identity, and visibility that we wrestled with in the creation of the act, inspired by the visual couture that overwhelmed the city of San Cristóbal through the huipiles extravagently embroidered with Mayan iconography, and inspired by the need to use the visually arresting power of fashion to platform activist causes in an effort to lead to social change.

If you are in NYC, I would love to see you. If you are not, I would love to see you digitally through: sinmaiznohayvida.org and through the connections with the activists organizations based in Mexico that have and are continuing to fight transgénicos nationally and beyond.

In the name of non-genetically modified ethical embodiment and fashion,
T*