Material Afterlives

As garments pass between bodies, households, cities and continents, they accumulate traces of use, continuously acquiring new meanings and new forms of value. Bringing together the work of Dominique Lanz and Jamal Nxedlana, this exhibition explores the continuing lives of used clothing, considering garments not as static objects or discarded matter, but as material carriers of cultural and material histories.

Although their practices emerge from different contexts and employ distinct methods, both artists reveal the ways textiles are able to accumulate histories and meanings over time.

Dominique Lanz’s interdisciplinary practice, rooted in textiles and expanded through collaborations with photographers and performers, follows the movement of garments through global systems of production and disposal. The installation from her body of work after the flood was made from textiles sourced from Ghana’s Kantamanto Market—the world’s largest second-hand clothing market—during a residency at Kokrobitey Institute in Ghana. Through processes that she learned during her time there, such as batik wax-resist dyeing and natural dyeing with kola nut and turmeric, alongside others that are part of her repertoire, such as layering, cutting and stitching, the fabrics take on a new material identity. The work reflects on waste colonialism and the ecological entanglement of human-made matter with nature. Drawing on allomimesis, a form of camouflage in which an organism adopts the shape, colour and posture of its surroundings, she imagines different ecological relationships and (im)possible futures. She also exposes the power that fabric has—it is not only protective to the wearer, but can also be vastly destructive. The photographs were taken by Accra-based photographer Michael Aboya.

Rather than looking at the worldwide scale, Jamal Nxedlana turns his attention to the material traces garments accumulate through everyday life. His ongoing project Stains as Data examines stains as repositories of memory, labour, intimacy and time. Combining photography with scientific imaging technologies, the work expands photography's capacity to render visible the material histories embedded within garments, revealing stains not as imperfections but as material records that challenge conventional ideas of value, beauty and waste. The spectral images presented in the exhibition were produced as part of Nxedlana's ongoing research at EMPA.

Together, the works show the many ways so-called post-consumer textiles continue to exist beyond their intended use. One zooms out and looks at them at the level of global systems of circulation; the other attends very closely to the personal traces left on their surfaces. They emerge not as static objects but as materials that continue to circulate, continue their life cycles and offer the possibility of generating new forms of knowledge. The transformation of used clothing is never merely material—it is also social, ecological, photographic and joyful. The question remains: how can something that has once been a witness to our own life, which Nxedlana reveals in his work, become something that we reject as worthless waste and simply leave for others to deal with?

Dominique Lanz's residency was made possible with the generous support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia Johannesburg.

Jamal Nxedlana's project Stains as Data: Memory and Poetics in Used Textiles is supported by the Pro Helvetia Focus Photo grant.