Waste colonialism and consumerism, environmental and social justice: the British artist’s latest project, Dead White Man, investigates the fate of the used clothes we send to the Global South
Dead White Man, the global trade in secondhand clothes
Back in 2017 Jeremy Hutchison was in an artist residency in Dakar, Senegal. Walking around the city he came across piles of secondhand clothes scattered everywhere: cars covered in jeans, sneakers dangling from trees. «I asked a shopkeeper, ‘Where are all these clothes from?’ – ‘From your country’ he said, ‘From the North’. Until then, I was ignorant about the massive global trade in secondhand clothes. Given that my art practice is focused on global flows of consumer goods, this came as a surprise. But it shouldn’t have: the secondhand clothing industry is supposed to be obscure», he says.
Most Western consumers are shocked to learn that their charitable donations are sold in Africa: a convenient ignorance which benefits both the charities and the multinational fashion brands. Following two research residencies at Raw Material Company (Senegal), Hutchison developed the project in close dialogue with The Or Foundation – an activist group based in the largest secondhand market in the world: Kantamanto, Ghana.
Jeremy Hutchison – Obroni Wavu: the White Dead Men’s Clothes
The title draws inspiration from the Ghanaians words which refer to Western secondhand garments: obroni wawu, which mean Dead White Men’s Clothes. Constructing a series of wearable sculptures from secondhand clothes, the artist became the embodiment of this toxic industry. «This ethic of detournement is central to the work. In the video installation, the monster reverses the supply chain. Rising from a secondhand market in Senegal, he wanders the streets of Dakar to find a shipping container which will return him to the Global North. Back in the UK, he haunts the shopping malls, high streets and financial districts», Hutchison explains.
Spanning across different media – video, photography, sculpture, performance and text -, Dead White Man appropriates the language and formal composition of an advertising campaign. Framed within the morbid logic of fast fashion, the monster circulates through billboards and slick magazines. To do so, Hutchison together with Spanish photographer Dani Pujalte – specialized in fashion photography -, explored ways to reproduce the visual language of fashion and high street branding, capable of seducing and disgusting – all at once.
Jeremy Hutchison’s body as a specter of waste colonialism
In Dead White Man, the artist’s body acts as a kind of bridge: collapsing geographies and time zones, it performs the link between Western consuming practices and the toxicity of the secondhand clothing trade, while raising awareness about the so-called “waste colonialism”. The term was coined in 1989 by the United Nations Environmental Programme. It refers to “the domination of one group of people in their homeland by another group through waste and pollution”.
«The garments we allocate to the secondhand trade occupy the same industrialised processes as garbage. Yet the global fashion industry has rebranded my trash as a resource. […] According to their logic, my trash is Africa’s goldmine. According to the Or Foundation, 40% of the clothes which arrive in Kantamanto market go directly to landfill. This assumption that my garbage can be rebranded as charity is white supremacy, pure and simple. It is an ideology that treats the Global South as a waste management solution».
Dead White Man at the British Textile Biennale
The project launched at the British Textile Biennale (29 September – 29 October 2023, Blackburn, Lancashire UK), offering a fitting context to the parallelism brought up by Hutchison between the secondhand industry and the mechanism of Empire. In the Eighteenth Century, Lancashire was transformed into an engine of fast fashion, becoming the industrial heart of global capitalism. Hutchison found at least two similarities between the functioning of the secondhand trade and the former British Empire.
«Lancashire’s economic miracle was produced on the back of industrial sabotage: Britain actively destroyed weaving facilities across the colonies, so that it could produce and sell clothes back to those colonies. Fast-forward three hundred years: the secondhand industry has destroyed clothing production across the African subcontinent. Secondly, our clothing donations often follow the same trade routes that were established during the transatlantic slave trade», he explains.
Garments and fashion: the new frontiers of colonization? Jeremy Hutchison’s Dead White Man
«With Dead White Man I would like to hit people in the brain, and then in the gut. At the recent launch of this project, a woman came up to me and told me that the work made her laugh, and then want to puke. I would like people to feel something physical. Because I think the best reactions are the embodied ones, the ones that do not happen in our pre-frontal cortex – but somewhere deep inside», Hutchison claims.
One of the main goals of this new body of work is to help people to see this industry as a colonization of the wardrobe. Hutchison’s friend, Cheikha Sigil – a Senegalese fashion designer – put it like this: «How do you colonize a person? Empty their wardrobe. Throw all their clothes in the trash: all the tradition, the culture, the meaning. Then replace them with your clothes. But your cast-off clothes, your hand-me downs, and dress them in those clothes. They will look like you, but like a cheap version of you. That is how you colonize a person».
Dead White Man – art as an assumption of responsibility
In Dead White Man Hutchison performs his own whiteness becoming the monster, the embodiment of the racist ideology which underpins global capitalism. Throughout his art practice, he has used his own subject position – white, male, British consumer – as a vehicle to explore the toxic dynamics which have oppressed minorities and several other categories of people over history.
«This work is not about guilt – it’s about taking responsibility and refusing the safety of silent shame. My whiteness is performed in different ways. Most obviously, in the display of caucasian flesh: each manifestation of the Dead White Man includes a white hand/leg/arm/foot. But my whiteness extends beyond skin colour – it’s an entire ethic. I am white in my clothes, my consuming practices, and my ethical codes. This is the whiteness I perform every day», Hutchison claims.
Jeremy Hutchison – the Western need to re-learn to engage with matter
Nowadays many people consider second hand as a valid alternative to buying new stuff – and thus consumerism -, but Dead White Man seems to prove quite the opposite. Hutchison has an idea how to get out of this loop: «If you want to donate used clothes, make sure they are in a good state, the state you would give to a friend. And the other stuff? Be inventive. But do not see them as clothes, see them as raw material».
«If you go to West Africa – or pretty much anywhere in the Global South – you’ll see people making use of what’s around them. But in the North, our relationship to material has collapsed. Most of us don’t know how to repair and re-fashion; we just know how to buy and trash. Capitalist ideology has transformed us into passive consumers, persuading us that we don’t know how to use our hands, and our imagination. But we do».
Jeremy Hutchison and the political dimension of art
In an increasingly selfish world, where it’s much easier to look the other way rather than taking ownership of our Western privilege, Hutchison’s practice aims at perverting dominant culture through the unpredictable languages of art. «I think art can do anything, because it can be anything. Personally, I’m not trying to provide answers or offer solutions; I’m more interested in queering power», he says.
«If this lends it a political dimension, I’m under no illusion my work is about to trigger the Marxist revolution – perhaps a momentary slippage in the facade of capitalist spectacle. So I think ‘teasing’ is perhaps closer to my ambition. Working with found matter -objects/words/situations-, I like shuffling things around. Exploring absurd alternatives. But maybe if I keep working like this, I might accidentally come up with all the answers».
Jeremy Hutchison biography
Jeremy Hutchison is a British artist based in London. Working across performance, sculpture, text and video he intervenes in systems of production and consumption, perverting norms to produce crisis and absurdity. Much of his work intervenes in consumer culture, subverting the mechanisms that sustain it: the language, media and labor practices.
