Our Workwear

Alchemilla:
‘For the mystical gardening collective there is no publicly visible sign of belonging to a collective, banner or marker. The only thing we need are our clothes that are marked with short random texts about melancholy and utopia.’

I think one of the functions of text on clothes is to speak to the wearer, but also to act as a guardian. It is frightening not knowing what I am getting into, for instance. I am concerned about that a lot with the gardening work, really.

I feel like these sayings, or charms, or texts are a way to keep magic close and accessible. Something like sewing a magic spell onto your clothes might keep them magically more powerful, or more active, or more effective.
Those histories of magical texts and what they look like and how they mediate magic and events, if you will. I like that stuff a lot.

I’ve thought about it and came up with a very simple answer to the reason why we should write on our workwear: beauty. The ugliness of so many work clothes, which we have already had to endure for too long, is indeed unbearable.

I would love to think about texts on the clothes that perfectly describe our attitude as well as a factor of change. As political slogans have a great effect on people they are exposed to and whether they are conscious of it or not, they are almost permanently exposed to them. Nothing seems to be more suitable for our common desire for true change than a clear attitude and prose. Slogans of and for the political struggle for a better world. Slogans that do not just summarize but that in the act of writing them and the claim to the power of the written word contribute to changing reality and acting against it. So we look for slogans that connect the visual and the immediate everyday with the problem of our world, its history and the development of capitalist modes of living to which our society is structured. We now need handwritten slogans that truly reflect our view of the real potential of the world. Texts that connect the banal and everyday life with the self-proclaimed ecological awareness and the need for change. We moreover need serious slogans that include the urgency and immediacy of our time and its ecological crises, which are associated with the anthropocene and the sixth mass extinction.