before cutting, wrap the scissors with yarn to spare yourself the sound of separation*
The continuous colonial project never cleans up after itself, after its violence. Likened to the aftermath of tailoring, colonialism produces shrapnel, detritus, cannon shells, broken cultures, cuts. Fragments get left behind. In a collaborative interdisciplinary inquiry including performance, video...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of Gothenburg
2022-09-01
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| Series: | Parse Journal |
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| Online Access: | https://parsejournal.com/article/before-cutting-wrap-the-scissors-with-yarn/ |
| Summary: | The continuous colonial project never cleans up after itself, after its violence. Likened to the aftermath of tailoring, colonialism produces shrapnel, detritus, cannon shells, broken cultures, cuts. Fragments get left behind. In a collaborative interdisciplinary inquiry including performance, video, sound collage and making, the AFRI_collective stitch seams of fashion languages about the past-now-and-here, seeking the regenerative intentions of recuperation after violence. In tailoring, offcuts are things discarded and sent to the cutting-room floor. Fragments that are cut off from the whole, from peoples, from practices, from markets become the echo chambers of unclaimed memories. The offcuts are cultural oddments, a residuum, relics and vestiges of dreams. Through sonic suturing of voice, dialects, bits of time, memories and other ways of wearing – of cloth as clothes – we explore, cut, collage, stitch, overlay/overlap these off-cuttings into new remembrances. The joins or seams within – and between – the five texts offer hybrid and audacious provocations. Joining the outskirts with the centre. Stitching sentences, punctuating bodies. Picked up, repurposed and presented as a dynamic set of decentred propositions, fashion’s colonial violence creates the generative possibilities for seeking new terms and forms sufficient for reformation and re-articulation, scripted into algorithms for a decolonial glossary of fashion. In the return, fashion as we redefine its use, finds its possible future in already remembered vernaculars. |
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| ISSN: | 2002-0511 2002-0953 |