[Re]fashioning: Establishing a Global Moratorium on New Clothing Production

Shanna Sim Ler Chung

,

2022-23

Algorithms are reassembling our material world. Our hyperconsumption has a reciprocal effect on our extended realities: but how and to what degree is the physical environment reorganised as a consequence of the algorithm? A dress is used as an interscalar vehicle to navigate across temporalities, political and geological space around ultra-fast fashion through polyester. From the digital space of TikTok’s For You page, to Shein’s online marketspace and their factories in Guangzhou, Sinopec’s oil extraction and refinery sites, to the Atacama Desert landfill, the dress provides a window to the sites of consumption, production, extraction, and pollution. The project speculates on the reappropriation of the infrastructures of fast fashion and the enactment of A Global Moratorium on New Clothing Production. The first act begins with the construction of a counter-trend to envision the temporality and physical scale of clothes dumped into landfill sites, confronting us with our extended realities. Reimagining its reciprocal infrastructures, the factory is reformed, accommodating a marketspace to sell garments locally; the shop becomes a library for collective ownership; and, as the consumer becomes a co-producer in refashioning, the capitalist economy of excess production is rejected. Through reappropriating the TikTok algorithm, the Global Moratorium proposes a refashioning of our existing resources, redefining our economic and political systems by reforming its infrastructures.

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