A minimalist wooden structure sits at the centre of the Uruguay Pavilion at the 57th Venice International Art Biennale. Some visitors may be puzzled at first, while others may try and climb the structure or walk inside it. Those visitors who instead stop and think soon realise this is not some kind of bizarre stage, but a wooden pen for animals or "embudo", a funnel-shaped structure employed in Uruguay since the 19th century to classify cattle.
The project, by Mario Sagradini, is entitled "La Ley del Embudo" (The Law of the Funnel) and invites people to consider the pen not just as part of history and of a century of rural work in the River Plate, but also as a jail, a place with a ritual or sacrificial function, a machine with the power to select and decide the final fate of bodies. The artist also prompts visitors to ponder about other issues that may be connected with these themes, including the bestiality of the human condition.
It is very common to buy a souvenir tote bag at the various pavilions of the Biennale and, while some of them just carry the name of a specific project, the Uruguay one is strictly linked with the "embudo". There is a print of a section of the pen on the bag, but the tote is also part of the Culture Factories program promoting creativity in vulnerable populations. The bag was indeed made in jail by the culture factory of textile and printing called HER (Hecho Entre Rejas) based in a women's prison in Montevideo.
While this is one of the many projects organised in prisons all over the world to break down stereotypes and stigmatisation, there is one contemporary brand we wrote about last year that is trying to bring the discourse to another level as well, Carcel (meaning "prison" in Spanish).
The Danish start-up knitwear project was founded by Veronica D'Souza, a social entrepreneur, who visited Peru, a country with a high-rate of drug-trafficking sentences for young women from poor backgrounds and low levels of education, but also a place well-known for its Alpaca wool.
Thanks to a partnership with the National Prison System of Peru and a local production manager inside the women's prison in Cuzco, Peru, D'Souza put together a manufacturing team to make a compact and basic men and women's wear collection of knitwear separates. All the pieces were created by designer Louise van Hauen.
It took the company a few months to set up the production and the brand debuted in August during Copenhagen Fashion Week with three 100 percent baby alpaca designs: a crewknit sweater; "Milano", a looser cardigan, and the chunky hand-knit bomber "La Bomba a Mano" (Hand Grenade; well, its shape and surface call to mind a hand grenade, but there is nothing violent behind this cuddly voluminous piece...).
The garments are now available online and the brand plans to launch new styles later on in the year. The items are sold on the company’s site and range from 120 euros to 1,190 euros. Each item includes the name of the woman who made it.
Carcel usually buys the materials, employs the women, pays their salaries and does quality control before exporting all the products to Copenhagen (their production and regional design managers live in Cusco and visit the prison every day, managing the workshop).
Carcel's site states that each woman is paid $15 for each item she makes and a woman can make 1-3 sweaters per day. "This is equal to 1 - 3x the minimum wage in Peru and more than the salary of an elementary school teacher," the site explains, "the women are paid in cash, directly, by our local production manager inside the prison. They are paid once a month, based on how many units they have made."
At the moment Carcel relies on 13 women, but recruiting will continue, as D'Souza states on the site: "We invest in the women in prison, in the best materials in the world, and in designing beautiful designs that can create a new market. The more we sell, the more women we can employ, and the bigger change we can create."
Such a venture may sound optimistically crazy to those luxury labels set on making more and more money without thinking about the human beings making or wearing their designs. Yet, if you want to have a genuinely positive impact on the world and radically transform the fashion industry, you must be incredibly ambitious and a bit crazy, while always preserving your optmism. It's definitely not orange that's the new black, but made in prison garments and accessories that can offer more opportunities to the artisans making them and fresher styles to consumers.
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