Vestitopoly@48hrs Neukölln ©Paolo Gallo | Abgebildet u.a. Lotti Seebeck und Aïcha Abbadi & Festivalbesucher:innen

VESTITOPOLY @ 48 Stunden Neukölln, Saturday, 24th June 2023

In front of a branch of a well-known second hand store chain. The planet is burning under the midday sun. The pouring rain from the evening before has disappeared, the air is hot and the streets are filling up. On Alfred-Scholz-Platz, the VESTITOPOLY playing field is already spread out, the rolling clotheshorses ready in their starting blocks and the oversized dice made from used clothing is attracting the first players.

Es berichtet die kritsche Modeforscherin Aïcha Abbadi

Es kommen: Nachbar*innen jeden Alters, Tourist*innen, Feiernde und Aktivist*innen, Juror*innen und Freund*innen auf Abifahrt: alle bereiten sie sich erwartungsvoll vor auf ihre erste Runde. Im bunten Gewusel erhaschen wir Blicke auf bunte selbst gehäkelte Tops und selbstgemachten Schmuck, Crop Tops und Cargohosen, Seidenröcke und Stickereien – auch ein Turban ist dabei. Inspiriert von der Hitze wird eine Spielerin zum spontanen Kleidertausch verleitet: ein luftiges STREETWARE-Kleid für das eigene Outfit, für die nächste Person am Spielfeldrand gelassen. Mit Sonnenschirmen in der Hand wir die Umrundung der Fragen- und Aufgaben-Felder zum lässigen sommerlichen Flanieren auf dem Neuköllner Boulevard.

Meanwhile, the first STREETSHOPPING tour is already back and has collected: fittingly, a t-shirt from “ON TOUR” with a label reading “made in Europe”, various sportswear items “Made in Syria”, a delicate floral prayer dress, a collection of shoes and much more. Freshly laundered, the latest collection is won by a new round of players. During VESTITOPOLY, they learn from one another, clothing stories, swap store tips and styling ideas. For each other, they put togehter: an opera outfit with a work apron, an elegant shell for the first ever drag show with crystal-embroidered red underwear and an offwhite long jacket, a birthday look with a sequined floor-length dress and rubber boots.

Few steps further: a group adorned in satin slip dresses with lace trims, draped over sweatpants and trekking sandals is conspiring about the latest repair workshops. Nostalgic memories come up about the dressy streets of Kinshasa, wishing a simultaneous transmission to the public squares of Neukölln. But look over there! The wishes have been heard and already the crowd is dressing up and everybody strikes a pose. Too soon, the playing round is over, but the players are not yet ready to move on. Skipped fields are caught up to test out every challenge.

all photographs © Paolo Gallo

In the meantime, the garments are accumulating on the world map in the centre of the playing field, sorted by production country. As expected, they pile up highest in Asia, but Europe is filling up as well. The USA and Ethiopia are represented, too. They do not stay there long, however, as they have already caught the eye of new players, who roll the dice until the last minute. Faster than expected, the sidewalks are rolled up. Disappointed faces and longing looks – the DB-Shirt is already gone, the BVG one too – but the game will go on tomorrow! Who knows what new wares the streets will bring?

Cats from Dubai Illustration © barbara caveng

A true story from Oderstraße in Neukölln, as it happened to me on 3.4.2023

I doubted the world, I doubted myself and above all my hearing. Was I suffering from an acoustic illusion caused by hypacusis, a sensorineural hearing loss?

Was my auditory perception in my Ieft ear no longer sufficient to understand the words in the context intended by the sender? Or in other words, had I gained the freedom to hear stories that had not been told that way?

I searched the other person's face for an interpretation of what had been said as I had heard it: "My cats from Dubai." Tentatively, almost bashfully, I ventured a repetition of the last two words, "...from.... Dubai...."

The day had held a lot of pain for me until these late afternoon hours, and so it seemed possible that my psyche had turned to other realities, obviously ones in which no Cheshire cats, but at least cats from Dubai were strolling across the tin roofs. Their existence was now confirmed to me by my chance acquaintance: "Yes," she added to my muttering, "just last week I picked up four cats from Dubai at the airport"!

In the reflection of her pupils, I saw the four cats flying over the Turkish-Syrian earthquake zone with a glowing eyes and splayed limbs. To land at Tegel - cats and other unusual flying animals have to fly into the airport, which is closed to normal air traffic - they ruffled their hair and lifted their humps by body contraction, initiating the braking process by extending their claws and digging into the ground on landing to come to an abrupt stop.

"Maybe you can ride my cats around town on the clothes horse sometime?"

Wow.... It took me some time to create the image in my mind of ambling through Neuköllln with cats on a rolling clothes horse instead of STREETWARE.
Would the animals cling to the clotheslines or hang like wet rags from two plastic strings or, hooking their tails, swing along to the rhythm of the cobblestones?

I preferred not to commit myself at this point, but to weigh the request carefully, and so I said goodbye - this, however, happily with the realisation that reality and phantasmorgia describe only two different perspectives of perception.

Performance in the windowsof the gallery nord/ art association Tiergarten (c) Joachim Gern & Paolo Gallo

I’M ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL

I’M ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL

DON’T PUT YOUR BLAME ON ME,

DON’T PUT YOUR BLAME ON ME

Rag ’n‘ Bone man

my body my choice – der Freiheitskampf von Lumpen und Gesindel

What meaning does clothing have when naked survival is at stake? When vestimentary codes become an existential confession and when the refusal of a certain dress code means that life hangs by a hair. What ethics does military chic follow and what attitude is hidden behind the camouflage? What endows the steely body sex appeal in an outfit that signals readiness to kill, and what message does a first lady send from the cover of Vogue?

Wo:men. Life. Freedom

Performers from STREETWARE examined their bodies, their own and other people's perceptions, put uniformed aesthetics up for debate and transformed the windows of the Galerie Nord into a space of breaking boundaries: Look at us! Alice, barbara, Flora, Jan, KDindie, Lotti, Nazanin and Oksana presented their bodies to the public and passers-by, covered and uncovered themselves, deformed their corporality and distorted their faces. They have formulated their perfect imperfect and flirted with the bad-bitch image, indulged in body worship and brushed each other's armpit hair. Butt cheeks to the left and right of the thong g-string challenged the eye and invited for a visual walk across body landscapes: Do[n't] hurt me!
I am only human after all, don’t put your blame on me!

Peep – O- Rama

Es ist für mich
Es ist für dich
Es ist für Uns

There were peeps by

Flora Carmim | barbara caveng | Alice Fassina |  Kdindie | Jan Markowsky | Oksana Moskovchenko | Lotti Seebeck | Nazanin Shamloo | leider erkrankt: Boris Steinberg

Photographs by Paolo Gallo and Joachim Gern
Technical support: Stephan Kolb and Gallery stuff
Idea and rehearsal management: barbara caveng
Organisation and production management: Alice Fassina

barbara caveng

is an interdisciplinary working visual artist with a focus on three-dimensional artistic practice, participatory art, interventions and performances.

Jan Markowsky

was an engineer in the GDR, in East and West Berlin. Contact with opponents through dissidents in Jena after imprisonment of his brother Bernd who was detained related to Wolf Biermann's expatriation, Jan emigrated to West Berlin in 1984. Various jobs as energy consultant and engineer for building services. Left the office in January 2000 after a dispute with his boss, then left his apartment.
"As a flexible and open-minded person, coped well overall with life without an apartment. Have had time to participate in preparing meals for the homeless, play theater, give lectures, participate in political committees. After a few years, regularly contributed to the social street magazine 'Strassenfeger' and later participated in 'Strassenfeger-radio'. During that time often photographed and interviewed.
Credo: I have nothing to hide, I can show myself!"

Lotti Seebeck

is an artist and cultural organiser who has been developing performances in collective formations that bring social issues into public space for several years. Intervention and site-specific research are always an important part of her work. She is part of the Common Ground initiative at the Berlin University of the Arts, which provides academic access to the arts for marginalised artists, and develops her own projects on community building, urban transformation and anti-discrimination.

Kindly supported by the Bezirksamtes Mitte, Berlin as part of the Recycling Design Prize exhibition. Special thanks to http://sektorheimat.de/, Institut für urbane Gestaltung.

on the occasion of the awarding of the 2nd Innovation Prize to STREETWARE saved item
By Stefanie Duncker on October 20,, 22 at the Kulturzentrum Pumpe, Berlin

LUMPENSAMMLEREI, WASCHSALON, TEXTILE FORENSIK, HAUPTWÄSCHE, FILIALEN, PROGRAMME, STÄRKESTOP

The starting point of the project are discarded clothes on the streets of Berlin. STREETWARE, directed by barbara caveng, understands the found objects as branches for textiles and equally for stories of local and global entanglement. Saved item - the rescued piece of fashion and clothing in this project stands for abundance and deprivation at the same time; but it also stands for quasi unread stories connected to these textiles. Which of the modern rags will be included in a new collection is therefore decided by the collectors: Is there something interesting in it or not? In their own shop, the garments are processed, made into a brand with logo patches, commercial bluff that is given away and sustainable use all in one. But this is only one part of the extremely comprehensive overall project: In the middle of Corona time, a 24-hour performance starts on a huge garment dump behind glass, branches of shops are also created in the district library, the collection is presented highly professionally with many amateurs on Tempelhofer Feld as a cat walk, numerous laundry stands on wheels form a kind of laundry sculpture in the park, homeless people advise the actors as they walk through 'the big flat' of the city, and Ugandan designers* and start-ups join in the discussion at a conference on culture and politics in the context of sustainability.

The makers of STREETWARE seem to follow every thread they find and develop their own action from it within the project. People from all contexts and from very different professions contribute with their knowledge of the cycles of textiles and with their ability to shape the STREETWARE collection as fashion, but also as a way of thinking. It is about resources of knowledge, material and visionary phantasy to think things further and make them visible.

The project is unique in its diversity. It is outstanding in terms of translating social, cultural and economic contexts into an artistic expression. STREETWARE - Saved item proves how branched and how connected society and unknown stories about clothing and textiles are. Artistically translated and with the participation of very different people, it exposes the use of resources using the example of clothing. It does so in a fun and integrative way that is also highly political.

Kunstasyl under the team leadership of barbara caveng has followed the ever-changing questions within the project without regard for its own resources. This is a dilemma in cultural work: one cannot avoid the questions that always arise anew and differently in the project. Kunstasyl does not evade, that is particularly impressive. We hope there is strength again or still for future projects.

We would like to support that a little.

The jury awards the second "Innovation Prize Socioculture" on the theme of sustainability with great fascination to the project "STREETWARE - Saved item" by the

Kunstasyl e.V. - with its Team leadership barbara caveng.

A sign against war- Alice Fassina | Annelie Wörpel | Céline Iffli-Naumann & KDindie  ©Paolo Gallo |26.09.2022 Marta Herford

They transform rags into culture: Alice Fassina | Annelie Wörpel | Céline Iffli-Naumann | KDindie | ©Paolo Gallo 

Then it struck me that these questions should arise in the same way when you look at clothes in the stores. There it is even more likely that there is a criminal atrocity and suffering behind the clothes' production.

Who are the human beings who made these clothes?"

WALK WITH US – degendre, decolonize, ecologize your style!

What a hot New Year's Eve it must have been, when the the lovers stripped off their clothes: Botton down! Salute sisterhood! Even in the gutter of Berlin's Leykestraße, a pair of pink panties with the feminist statement above the buttocks: 'Periods are cool' clings to the starched chest of a tuxedo shirt from the Ibbenbüren menswear factory Jassö Atelier. Whether the gallant in the smoking shirt got the cuffs when he read in the light of the street lamp the female avowal to bleeding: 'Periods are cool . And messy. And painful. And great.'

Love is in the gutter - So the year 22 begins politically romantic and if Annett Louison had not already given herself musically to the gutter in 2019, we would reach her at the latest there with the words:

I celebrate the feast before I fall
I celebrate the feast before I fall
We are the dream couple from the gutter
And tonight you take me as your wife
We're somehow unbeatable
and only tomorrow
will be grey oh, oh
Oh oh
will be grey oh, oh
when we are grey oh, oh
listen to the song ....

Aïcha Abbadi

CW 36 + 37

Field Work

In close proximity and yet in an entirely different world, an offsite fashion show is in the making on Tempelhof Field while an art and fashion fair is taking place inside the former airport.
Taking place within the city’s fashion week time frame, STREETWARE’S open air catwalk nonetheless operates within another temporal reality. Its clotheshorses on wheels are scattered in between families on picnic blankets gathered for a kite festivity, models walking undeterred through the paths of rollerbladers and skaters. Voices are muffled by the wind as different sources of music are transported in waves across the field. A van with three police officers stands by and quietly observes. The models are made up of performers, students and local neighbours. They are gettng changed, wearing outfits styled for them but in which they also had a say. The youngest, Marianna, is only one year old. Her mother, Sara, is also excited about her own first time modelling, although she notes that if she would continue doing it, she would have to buy herself a mirror, as she does not own one. Some finishing touches of hair and make-up are being added and the choreography rehearsed. Friends brought as support are waiting in anticipation, the first passersby curiously stopping in their tracks.

They demonstrated for fashion standards of a fairer future and as a contribution to the debate on body image and aesthetics:  Manuela Coelho | Marlene Sommer | NavaNaimaPan | Nazanin Shamloo  | Nomadin der Lüfte |Pauli | Philairone | Purvi Dhrangaderiya | Sara Tivane | Sarah Nevada Grether | Sophie Stolle | Zohara © Anja Grabert and Paolo Gallo

Learning about the concept behind the show, made up entirely by STREETWARE items, conversations about their own clothes unfold within the public. A group of friends and siblings, following sustainable stylist Mo Latif’s invitation, discusses the special bond created by garments shared with one another and passed on to someone close.

In conversation with front-row guests .

Even though most of the show’s guest at first describe themselves as not very knowledgeable about fashion, it turns out that among them are former models, fashion designers, stylists, costume makers and sewing enthusiasts. Many are wearing garments which they have sewn or altered from second-hand pieces themselves, although one confesses to a passion to online shopping and trying out new styles found on online blogs. For those having moved to Berlin from abroad, the city has created a shiS in mindset, described as having a more conscious approach to fashion, with swaps and second-hand pieces part of the experience of living here.

One skater, at first irritated by the models in her way, becomes enthusiastic as she learns more about the background. It turns out she used to be a fashion designer but stopped working in the industry many years earlier due to its lack of fair practices. Not far away from her, another designer, VICENTE relates that it was at around the time she stopped that he really started. All the pieces he makes are one-of-a-kind, from up-cycled materials, which he has done so from the beginning.

 Manuela Coelho presenting, poltical haute couture‘ by Ruth Faith Nalule | Geneviève © Anja Grabert  

Manuela, modelling “the dress” from Uganda, relates a special connection to the garment which she describes as carrying the baggage of history and containing a piece of all corners of the world. Coming from Mozambique and having seen the consequences of textile waste firsthand, wearing the dress means more to her than just presenting it: she wishes to create awareness about the social and ecological consequences of fashion, as well as set an example for her children. Since growing up in wartime Mozambique, she has always been tending to garments, tailoring and repairing them to make them last longer, passing along those values in the family. Her daughter also walks in the show and as Manuela passes on the dress to her, it becomes a symbolic statement of passing on the future to the next generation.

Laura Marie Gruch | Manuela Coelho | Geneviève  presenting, poltical haute couture‘ by Ruth Faith Nalule © Anja Grabert  

As the catwalk show comes to its finale in a tableau with everyone involved, it generates even more attention. Those distracted up to that point with their own recreational activities, quickly note down further information as they learn the shown pieces are made available for rental the week after. The VESTITHEK, located in Neukölln’s Helene-NathanLibrary, on one of the top floors of a shopping arcade and well integrated between shelves filled with books and music albums, follows in the tradition of clothes lending libraries which have emerged in various locations. Among the first professionally run ones in Europe was Lånegarderoben, which opened in Stockholm in 2010. While most of them operate in individual shop spaces or community centres, the VESTITHEK’s integration into the municipal library opens up the concept to new publics. Appearing as if it had always been there, it merges old and new habits, starting a discussion by merely being present.

The BiG Wash - installation, performance, interventiuon at Waschsalon 115, Torstraße, Berlin-Mitte

'I don’t like washing but my job for now requires that I wash for my boss and her family. The children play outside, and the clothes get dirty. Sometimes, I hide what I find difficult to wash so that I don’t have to wash them.
I need this job so I must pretend that I like it and it’s the only way I get money to take care of my daughter and my family.' Juliet Laker, house help/maid

STREETWARE X MIVUMBA – barbara caveng, Beatrice Lamwaka | Eria Mutalwa | Jim Joël Nyakaana | Josephine Nakiyimba – SSuubi Design | KisituAloysius | Rose Katusabe | Ruth Faith Nalule
Concept and realisation at Waschsalon 115 - STREETWARE saved item – Alice Fassina, barbara caveng, Lotti Seebeck, Stephan C.Kolb
Special thanks to Tobias Breithaupt, managing director of Waschsalon 115 in Berlin - Mitte

A woman scrubs the 'big laundry' with a brush, maltreats the hems that limit her life. The traces are erased - the stains shine blindly. From 15 to 30 November 2021, a white sheet in the window of laundromat 115 on Berlin's Torstraße became a projection screen for videos in which women's hands rubbed textiles, providing an example of an economy of washing that is predominantly female but does not appear in any gross national product. Passers-by who walked across the threshold of Berlin's most famous laundromat on Rosenthaler Platz were confronted with images hurling at them from the drums of the machines: In colourful basins, hands wringed and trafficked the textile accumulation of their household. From pants to laundry, no intimacy was hidden from them, no trace of bodily divestment spared.

"Laundry, washing welfare" - The role of women is enmeshed in the history of washing ; colonial continuities are played out in the global divide between eco-wash and water bucket.

During an artist residency in Uganda in summer 21, barbara caveng let herself be guided by the laundry spread out on meadows and over hedges. Together with the author Beatrice Lamwaka, the fashion designer Ruth Faith Nalule, the photographer Jim Joël Nyakaana and the social entrepreneur Kisitu Aloysius Musanyusa, laundry became their material for an artistic research and exploration about economy, ecology, feminisms and coloniality.

'I wash twice a week since the baby is always in pampers. I have a positive attitude towards washing but the problem finding time to wash because it takes so much time. There is a day when I kept my baby’s clothes not washed for two days and the stains refused to get off, because she had started drinking and eating, I think these ones need to be soaked with a strong detergent like for two days.

And I like clothes with a good smell after drying, so I prefer sunlight washing powder and put sosoft to soften her clothes and have a nice smell. If you are a stay home mother, I think washing every day is better or after one day; soak one day and wash the next day, and also, I must say that it's expensive to buy soap and other detergents.' Fortunate Tusasirye, new mother and Programme Assistant, FEMRITE

'I am responsible for my hygiene and health, so I must wash. I was for my partner as well. Sometimes, I wish he could assist me, and we wash together, and I also wish he could wear his clothes for a little longer, so I don’t have so many clothes to wash.' Giovanna Lamunu, Lawyer

to the left: Beatrice Lamwaka embroidering quotes from conversations about washing on bedsheets & to the right: 'female economy' barbara caveng © Lotti Seebeck

In cooperation with Beatrice Lamwaka, a series of interviews on the subject of washing was created. These explored together with the laundresses the physical and psychological effects of manual textile care without electricity and water as available commodities and explored the impact on the individual biographies, self-realisation and professional lives. Excerpts from the conversations were audible in one of the salon's clothes dryers: 'while doing laundry', one of the women interviewed said, she also thought about how her family could survive at all. 'I have to do it' - Rose Katusabe's voice rang out in the drum. 'It is my routine.'
Under the titel How to measure a man through handwashing an essay by Beatrice Lamwaka is published on our website. 

Is the washing machine the great liberator of women?

On the photographs: Alice Fassina | barbara caveng | Ruth Faith Nalule | Beatrice Lamwaka | Jim Joel Nyakaana | Kisitu Aloysius Musanyusa | Sidney Noemi Stein | Stefan Targatz | ©Lotti Seebeck 

ps: Returning to Uganda, Ruth Faith Nalule sought out a laundromat - they exist in Kampala too, but their use is reserved for the few. During a telephone conversation on december 17 she demanded 'the right for all to use a washing machine - Our country must develop towards this before we die over the basin.'

'The Congress on the Clothes Dump' described a series of events between September and November 2021 dedicated to an inclusive and participatory philosophizing about the meaning of clothes, their production, distribution and consumption. Invited guests and random attendees digged into textonic layers, searched for solutions, questioned the ethics of the second skin. Clothing protects and adorns. It represents basic aesthetic and existential needs, but its mode of production destroys the environment on a large scale and endangers the physical and psychological well-being of the people who cope with the manufacturing processes in socially intolerable conditions. How could sustainable production and economy look like - this is what we explored between November 16 and 28 together with author Beatrice Lamwaka, fashion designer Ruth Faith Nalule, photographer Jim Joel Nyakaana and Social Entrepreneur and environmental activist Kisitu Aloysius Musanyusa in a multi-perspective way. Venues for the public pondering were Bikini Berlin, the laundromat 115 in Torstraße and the Vestithek in the Helene Nathan Library.