Mending is a form of resistance!
Coming together at Sudestada on July 25th, we can explore this intervention through the act of mending our precious textiles: forming relationships with our clothes, objects, and with each other. Pamphlets and examples of darning, mending, and patchwork stitching, as well as materials will be provided. Please bring yourself (and maybe a friend) and an object you wish to mend.
ABOUT DARN IT!
The detailed hand stitching of mending scars naturally display the intimate relationship and innate sustainability humans used to have with their clothes. The very act of mending a textile today becomes a form of resistance in itself: resistance to the relationship- or lack thereof- we have with our belongings we are so quick to discard. When one actively chooses to mend a garment, saving it from the landfill, a relationship is thus formed. ‘Darn it’, like any mending act, looks to intervene in the rapid death cycle of consuming clothing today, and to help foster deeper relationships with one's objects as a whole.
Hekima Hapa is a Fashion Designer, social entrepreneur, author and Founder of the 24 year sustainable independent fashion brand inspired by Africa and the people of its diaspora, Harriet’s Alter Ego also known as Harriet’s by Hekima. In 2013, she founded Black Girls Sew, a nonprofit organization committed to positively impacting the lives of youth and families through education in sewing, design and entrepreneurship. She currently runs Sew Green Arts out of Brooklyn.
Kate Sekules is a mending and fashion historian, professor, and practitioner. She lectures widely, runs events and repair clinics, including Dr Mend’s clothes surgeries, and hosts #MendMarch on Instagram. She has published and presented academic research at over two dozen symposia internationally, is completing her doctoral dissertation, A History and Theory of Mending at Bard Graduate Center, NYC, and teaches fashion history—and mending—at Pratt Institute, Parsons and BGC. She is author of MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto (Penguin, 2020)
Martina Cox is an artist based out of New York City. After graduating from the Cooper Union in 2018, Martina founded her eponymous clothing label, selling one-off garments made to order as a way to uphold slow fashion values. Since closing her business in 2021, Martina has continued to make work about fashion history and craft through Sculpture, Drawing and Performance. She began hosting monthly mending clubs as a way to address methodologies and spaces where we can learn to heal relationships with objects we often deem as disposable.
