On 24. April 2013 the builiding of Rana Plaza textile factory collapsed and buried 1135 people under it. This day marked it as the fourth largest industrial disaster in history: it can not go on like this!

Not only textile workers, unions and NGOs call for a change, more and more consuments become active too. Risk your live in unstable buildings for a wage that is not even enough to make a living? This is what textile production looked like in germany 100 years ago. Now through colonisation we have exported these conditions to the global south. For a clean image the big fashion labels count on eco cotton and "made in europe" as alibi. But not many people here know that the working conditions in eastern europe are some time even worse than in asia.

 flächendeckend noch schlechter sind als in Asien wissen hier nur wenige.

We have to radically change the way we handle fashion!
In our wardrobes, in the factories and stores, on the street and in the system.
As a global movement!

Join us!

On the annual day of the collapse of the Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh we comemorate the victims and the injured.
Together with millions of people worldwide we claim it's time for a FASHION REVOLUTION!
We call for: secure builidngs, transparent supply chains, decent working conditions and higher wages - now.

- sew protest banners

- our sewing-cargo-bike will be there

- clothes swap - anticapitalist shopping

- Photosession, ask a brand "who made my clothes?"

- exhibition "Seamstress - the strong women from south-east-asia" (FEMNET, german)

7-9 pm

Not only seamstresses and weavers have to work for the profit of big fashion labels, the working conidtions in the shops of these brands are also questionable.

Here in europe consumers and workers have more possibilities to act against these injustices and we should use these to support our colleagues on the global south. On the other hand we can learn a lot e.g. from the years of experiences that asian unionists have fought for a living wage.

How can practical solidarity look like across borders along the supply chain?

Michael Fütterer (Frankfurt/Main) from TIE Bildungswerk

14 - 16 Uhr

This talk is based on the comic Interlining: hand-sewn stories (Barcelona, 2010-2015) which will be part of the Collective Book Exhibition. This comic relates “autobiographical” stories of women textile workers, representing a collective knowledge about the technology of fabric and sewing. It questions gender representations through clothing, and above all it sets out the body of the woman worker as a desiring body which is organic and in a continuous process of transformation and self-representation. Thus, from a feminist and decolonial perspective, the comic reflects on the social class origin of craft and industrial workers in order to criticise current practices of textile art whose focus on “the author” endorses gentrification.

During this talk we want to undress the social image of the woman textile worker as an invisible “piece” in a huge capitalist and postindustrial apparatus. Using graphic tools and self-publishing strategies, Jessica Espinoza intends to visibilise the daily resistances of women workers, their political activisms and their desiring bodies.

Language: Spanish with German and/or English translation

Jessica Espinoza_Dibruja Blog

Jessica Espinoza_Dibruja Sewing Tattoo

4:30 - 6pm

The feminist sewing collective reSew from Kiev talks about their artistic-collectivist work at the intersection of craft, solidarity economy and textile production.

ReSew sewing cooperative is a feminist collective that elaborates and practices alternative production, using such instruments as consensus, group dynamic and nonviolent communication. Cooperative is trying to introduce upcycling in the production of textiles and clothing and develop new types of economic schemes based on decent and labor-proportional income distribution.

reSew Kyiv auf Facebook

7 pm

Six years hace past since the Rana Plaza textile factory collapsed. What has changed in the textile industrie since then?

Fabienne Winkler from Kampagane für Saubere Kleiderung and ENS Sachsen presents the recent research concerning the human rights situation in the fashion industry, with a focus on eastern europe.

Afterwards we will discuss: Who exactly has to do what to change the situation? What can we do to enforce this change?

Link Lohn zum Leben Campaign Website (german)

11am - 2pm

Huge knitting with warning tape, sew balaclavas, knitting graffiti in public spaces, Pussy-Hat, anti-surveillance clothing...

After an insight on the subversive potential of textile form of resistance, we will try them ourselves and prepare an action in solidarity with textile workers on strike.

mit dem Kommunikationskollektiv Koko

source: div, u.a. Memorarte: Arpilleras Urbanas

Seamstress are often left out of the male dominated writing of history.
In the workshop we want to make the stories/history of seamstresses and sewing as an act of resistance visible. We collect everyday stories from the neighbourhood, stories from our relatives, slogans of seamstresses, draw and sew ourselves to build up a collective archive which documents our own history, includes decolonial perspectives in a self-critical way and adds to the improvement of working conditions of seamstresses today.

Jessica Espinoza will present her collective research OBSERVATORIO DE LA BIENAL DE AGUJA Y HILO. It is a historical memory space around labor rights, informative manuals, historical processes of resistance micropolitics AND ITS LANGUAGES of textile workers against neoliberal necropolis.

It is a workshop of archive, creation and ritualization.

from 1pm

Crossstitch, satin stitch, french knot stitch, wtf*?

We use the knowledge every good houswife should have to turn it against its paternalistic bourgrois intention and use it to fight against patriarchy.

Bring your cheekiest motives - it's time to emboirder!