Project Description
SHOPPING?
Shopping? Is about ‘Waste Colonialism’ and the ways in which one group of people use waste and pollution to dominate another group of people in their homeland. The term seems to have been first recorded in 1989 at the United Nations environmental programme Basel Convention, however it is now being used more widely as we focus on Climate change and try to unravel the many and various ways the planet’s eco system has been damaged.
It’s now estimated that we throw away 2 million tons of textiles a year. As the African continent is the biggest consumer of second-hand clothes, 70% of our donated clothes are shipped to Africa for resale in local markets.
But now, in places like Kenya, the garments arriving are such poor quality that it can’t be resold, and 50% is dumped, clogging up drains, contaminating rivers or burned in huge landfill sites.
The Global north continue to shift the burden of waste disposal onto county-tries with the least capacity to deal with it.
Shopping? Is of course, a statement, a visual short cut to draw attention to the Global North’s addiction to cheap clothing and landfill in the Global South. But its primary purpose is to start a conversation from a different perspective.
In ‘An Aesthetic of Blackness: strange and oppositional’, the inimitable and much missed, Bell hooks wrote
“ I understood that advanced capitalism was affecting our capacity to see, that consumerism began to take the place of that predicament of heart that called us to yearn for beauty. Now many of us are only yearning for things…”
In an increasingly fractured world the role of the artist is not always clear. In a climate emergency where climate justice is inseparable form racial justice, what is the role of a Black Artist in the ‘overdeveloped’ world?
For me the role is to produce images that will inspire change and action.
We need a grassroots emergency response to the textile industry’s inability to stop expanding. We need to dismantle the fashion system, and replace it with local, sustainable and historically and culturally relevant systems that put wellbeing and planet over profit.
