EXERCISING COMPASSION enables sensing otherwise by stepping away from individual actions and focusing on the collective practices. Fashion often privileges individual needs and instant gratification over long-lasting relationships. By confronting our sufferings caused by the effects of this self-centred industry, this encounter embraces collective practices and provokes sensibilities. It touches beyond surfaces to stimulate different emotional responses and experiences. Fashion then becomes a tool and a medium that connects us with each other through sharing and making. To exercise compassion, we invite you to openly embrace feelings of confrontation and discomfort, and to embody different realities.

Santiago Útima, Siviwe James, Widi Asari and Riyadhus Shalihin

bodies that make, bodies that consume, 2022.

Santiago Útima, Siviwe James, Widi Asari and Riyadhus Shalihin, met after being selected through an open call to co-create commissioned work specifically for Exercising Compassion. Their work is the result of 4 months of co-creation in a digital environment. Through this process, they have experienced the challenges of battling time zones, language barriers and finding common ground between practice and theory. For more information about the co-creators, check their biographies in their personal works displayed around.

bodies that make, bodies that consume reflects on material residues as workers' truth, the deep-rooted voids of erasure of textile and clothing manufacture workers’ conditions. Residue becomes displaced memory, traces of evidence and ruins connected to the process of industrialization of countries of the global south: Colombia, South Africa and Indonesia. This is evidence that industrialization and excessive (if not inhumane) labour conditions on local peoples has acted as a form of colonisation of land/bodies/environments and experiences. The co-creators hope to bridge the gap between ‘the hands that make’ and the ‘bodies that consume’ with a desire of addressing the various emotional and physical situations labourers endure.