Hybrid Memories

On average, every person in Germany buys 60 new items of clothing a year and then wears them for only half as long as 15 years ago. No wonder we don’t develop a personal relationship with them, let alone acquire a sense of responsibility for our material resources. So how can we start to take more interest in the origin and quality of our clothes again? Instead of fabric stemming from the globalized textile hyper-production, this project uses the resources of high-quality garments that are no longer used. These textiles are completely or for the most part still unscathed and of a special, durable material quality, which adds a temporal and social dimension to the material one. For a shorter or longer period of time, they were integral to somebody’s life – linked to one specific person and an expression of their personal style. Now the pieces are separated and, depending on their condition, either used as a whole or processed into a felted yarn, in order to become new hybrid garments through new arrangements and material connections. Their origins mix and their materiality becomes a projection screen of abstract memory.

Judith Grah