Recovery has been brought up to date during the pandemic and is revolutionizing our ability to extend the life of our clothes and items. An ancestral practice that today seeks to respond to a double challenge, economic and environmental, but not only… It would also be synonymous with recovery and healing when it tries to give life to objects, vectors of story and emotion. A point that will be addressed during the “Eternally Yours” exhibition that will be discovered in London until the start of the school year.
There are countless YouTube channels, Instagram profiles, and books devoted to fixing, patching, or evenupcycling all kinds of clothing and objects, attesting to the growing interest in a practice that fell into disuse a few decades ago. Falls within the much broader category of: Do it yourself (DIY), these practices are making a strong comeback at a time when the climate crisis, coupled with an economic crisis, is pushing the public to adopt new, more responsible — and economic — behaviors. More concretely, it is about combating overconsumption by extending the life of our products, whether they have a financial or emotional value.
In London, Somerset House kicked off the summer season with a free exhibition devoted entirely to this notion of repair, of the object as of the mind. By highlighting various examples of creative reuse, old products or recent works, the journey of “Eternally Yours” is an invitation to reconnect with old and worn objects, whatever they are, and to share their story and the emotion that conveys them. comes to appreciate. The exhibition “takes the idea of ’recovery’ as a philosophy and a provocation, inviting us to rethink our way of life and our relationship with the planet and everything around us”.
Gee’s Bend, Boro and Kintsugi
From the survival stories sewn into the soles of Syrian migrants’ shoes by Aya Haidar to the upcycling of items recovered by Aono Fumiaki after the 2011 Japan tsunami, repair is revealed for the first time in a new light, between the The power of healing and the duty of remembrance increases tenfold the emotional value of items that, as has been the custom for decades, could have ended up in the dump. “Eternally Yours” wants to shine a light on the value of what seems worthless,” the organizers explained in a press release.
The journey begins with a tribute to the many creative expressions of repair, from here and elsewhere, with an emphasis on ancestral traditional methods. The Gee’s Bend quilts, made by several generations of women in a remote Alabama hamlet, the art of boro, which consists of mending clothes with patchwork of fabrics, or even kintsugi, a Japanese art that mends broken pottery with gold. are one of the highlighted practices.
The “Eternally Yours” exhibition, which ends on September 25, will be punctuated by workshops and demonstrations of repair and upcycling that will allow visitors to discover techniques intended to extend the life of many types of objects, giving them the opportunity to opportunity to transform their personal belongings.
(ETX Daily Up)