Camila Salcedo  

This solo installation, made out of discarded clothing from Soulpepper's wardrobe department, serves as a commentary on Canadians' negative contributions to the growth of the fast fashion industry. The act of donating, which is regarded as an act of "good faith", has incredibly harmful repercussions. The 30 sq feet of clothes that hangs from the ceiling is a visual representation of the 1 billion pounds of clothes (about 5 billion times what you see) "donated" by Canadians yearly to Majority World Countries such as Kenya, where second-hand clothes are imported and resold as mitumba "or bundles" of largely unwanted clothes that often end up dumped and burned and diminish local sustainable fashion economies, or Chile, where 60K tonnes of clothes are dumped yearly at the Atacama desert, leaching chemicals into the waterways and contributing to the global climate crisis. Through this installation, the artist invites participants to reflect on their own habits of consumption and urges them to consider the lifecycle of the clothes in their closets from often unethical production to ultimately becoming trash – beginning and ending the cycle with exploitation of humans, economies and land in the Global South.