Contribution short abstract:

The paper examines how an upcycling fashion project inaugurated a new form of belonging and public visiblity for women in Germany's Ruhr that valued their stories of migration, inverting the normalized, everyday socio-spatial politics of Castrop-Rauxel.

Contribution long abstract:

The paper focuses on a participatory art project that emerged out of a cooperation between Berlin-based artist Nadin Reschke and the International Bildungs- und Kulturverein für Frauen (IBKF) based in Castrop-Rauxel. Thematically the project conjoined a resurgent interest in textiles and handicraft among contemporary artists with the current urban trend of “upcycling” in its idea to establish a fashion label among women with a “migration background,” one that would produce and sell clothing designed in relation to the women’s particular biographical histories. In this article, I draw upon writers in film theory and feminism to argue that this project offered these women a mode of resistance and agency, both in relation to the “fashion industry” and within the socio-spatial politics of small-town Germany. Within respect to the former, I argue that by expanding clothing into a set of narrative objects and relocating labor in the hands of these woman--who thus acted both producers as well as models--the project inaugurated two “communities of sense” – that is, two new trajectories for “what can be seen, what can be said, and what can be done.” (Rancière 49) In doing so, the project inverted the normal everyday socio-spatial politics of Castrop-Rauxel, offering to participants a mode of belonging to the public commons on the basis of their migration experience, rather than in spite of it. More broadly, the project exemplifies an alternative practice for revalorizing discards and leftovers that contrasts with the dominant logic and imagery of the Ruhr's post-industrial renaissance.