World 223, Enactment i: report

This Enactment explored World 223, in which waste garments become raw materials for housing.

It was organised by Manuela Gómez, Valentina Casale, Jeimy Larios and Simón De Zubiría, third-year undergraduate BA Design students in the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

It was one of a number of enactments that were created by students for a public event, Wearable Speculations, at Juanita Echeverri’s gallery in Bogotá.

The text guiding this Enactment:

In World 223, the United Nations issued a statement prohibiting the industrial production of construction materials. Due to the lack of new resources, a recursive and ingenious ecosystem emerges in which garments, the most common waste in landfills, transition from being solely a direct shelter for the body to having new functions as raw materials for housing. Building their own homes becomes an act of creativity and autonomy, which makes these new spaces much more valuable due to the newfound sense of ownership.

In this enactment, visitors were invited to act as a community that builds its refuge with the help of all its members, using a variety of materials.

For more details, see the group’s report (which includes a recipe to recreate the enactment for yourself):

The whole Wearable Speculations event was a great success, attracting a big audience to experience the fictional worlds. The students were proud of their achievements.

These are reflective comments from one member of the group, Simón:

As designers, sometimes we are supposed to give answers to solve problems, big problems that are out of reach. And with Fashion Fictions, we just opened questions. And visitors took our questions with them, and perhaps with time, they will change something, even though it is a little thing that can start making a significant change.

The group also shared a reflection from one of the participants:

One visitor expressed to us how striking she found the world due to its ability to engage in dialogue with the future.

This Enactment was devised by Manuela Gómez, Valentina Casale, Jeimy Larios and Simón De Zubiría, based on a World contributed by the same group, using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the authors and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.

Photographs: Alejandro Barragan.