commissioned by the Trash-5 festival
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
2024
My proposition for the Trash-6 was to connect the problem of Waste with the problem of Class. I think that research on pollution and toxic governmental politicks toward waste can not be progressed without looking at the life and work conditions of people who are working to organize this waste. Within this frame, I focused on the sewing workers, who are producing the clothes for export to Russia and partly China and Kazakhstan. The sewing waste often used to be burned in the city of Bishkek, sadly contributing to the ossified order of things.
The idea of a Sanatorium for Seamstressesis derived from the project Utopian Unemployment Union, started back in 2012. It is the ongoing research on alternative collaborations, aimed to subvert the status quo. Besides the fact of the wrong use of sewing waste by burning it, there a toxic work policies that play an important role in the story.
The proposition is to construct the situation for the encounter of seamstresses and artists aiming to reflect upon the idea of toxic work relationships metaphorically seeing as a waste and the literal unsolved problem with waste as a result of the disproportional spread of the capital, as a implication of the corruption and nepotism, allowing people at power to waste the money which supposed to be for the solving the problem of suffering lower class people from pollution.
Our project has its origin in a real story. Our friend has told us about her husband who had been fired and was so terrified that run away to his mother’s place. He was ashamed to look in his wife’s and children’s eyes as it is said: ‘A man without a job is like a horse without a saddle’. The wife and children kept telling him: ‘We love you the way you are, we don’t care if you’ve got a job or not’. But he was devastated. He started drinking and nearly became a drunkard, but suddenly a miracle happened. He found a new job, his wife started working too and the story had a happy ending..