File Note 141: Tenant of Culture

Hendrickje Schimmel calls her practice Tenant of Culture in order to flip the typical tendency for fashion industry outlets to present themselves as ‘houses’ or ‘ateliers’. Rather than suggesting a master artisan, Tenant of Culture brings to mind someone who merely rents their art.

As Schimmel has explained in several interviews, the reference is to cultural historian Michel de Certeau’s explorations of renters operating within larger structures that uphold them through an asymmetric position of reliance. Grand institutions draw rents from participants with whom they can only interact on lopsided terms. Through both this moniker and her working materials, ToC aims to put glamour’s underbelly on full display. This is the view from the one who pays the rent.

ToC’s work achieves a reversal of fashion industry norms through a retrieval of beauty from the waste generated in untold tonnage every year. She works primarily with offcasts, rendering new pieces from the residue of the fashion industry’s ‘postconsumer waste’. This resistant participation sets up a framework for production on new terms, both by ToC herself and those drawn into her projects’ perspectives. Setting up a series of ambivalences, she samples the leftovers of a highly profitable industry and then draws them into another productive context. Remade into newly valuable display pieces for art galleries and private collections they are accompanied by a dedicated set of workshops, drawing participants closer in to both conceptual questions and processes of production and wastage.

While worn-out clothes have existed in every era, since the mid- twentieth century they have been purposefully generated through the strategy of ‘scheduled obsolescence’. Designing items to collapse irreparably, manufacturers use this model to secure a steady customer base for luxury products (a method deployed from clothes to cars to tech). Countless landfills and trash islands are filled with these ruined garments, blending freely with other domestic by-products.

ToC’s work succeeds for two reasons: firstly the sheer scale of dumped items is so vast that estimates are easily reduced to statistical noise. Demonstrating the damage done to ecosystems (and labourers) by fashion industry practices requires drawing our attention back to the micro. ToC’s reworking of familiar garments (trainers, handbags, coats) into new forms draws our gaze across that which is generated only to be cast aside. Secondly, any workable ecologism fit for the rest of the twenty-first century will have to take the form of a rescue mission— retrieving and reversing damage already done, rather than just scaling back the ongoing harm. ToC gives us a glimpse of the practices we’ll need to devise a million times over for the planet to survive.

For her part, ToC sees her practice as a merging of eras, expectations and intimacies. Since she works with garments that have already ‘served their time’, the question of whose trash it is remains unclear: the factory’s or the household’s? In an interview with 650mAh Gallery, Hove, she discussed a workshop where participants had refashioned donated garments. ToC remarked:

“The materials we use have been recently manufactured but the word ‘workshop’ also refers back to a time before the industrial revolution decentralised and deskilled the means and methods of textile and garment production. The ‘workshop’, often being located in the maker’s home, where all elements of fabrication, from raw-material to weaving and assembling, happened in the same space. In that sense the ‘workshop’ also implies an intimacy, connected to the domestic environment and family bond.”

Two entries from 2021’s Puzzlecut Boot sequence (Black and Oxblood) – both displayed last year at the SOPHIE TAPPEINER gallery in Vienna – provide more elaborate and cluttered visions. Sourced from postconsumer waste, these pieces are less wearable than the harlequin suit (at least for unadventurous walkers). The sibling boots have stack heels (two for Puzzlecut Boot Oxblood, four for Puzzlecut Boot Black). In Puzzlecut Boot Black, a symmetrical scheme of black and grey heels provides some visual texturing, while in Puzzlecut Boot Oxblood the heels complete a thread of darker red that curves up diagonally from them through the piece’s tongue. This tenuous accretion of surfaces makes it hard to resist the image of feeling one’s bodyweight press down through this repetitive and insecure surface. Would we crash right through, or just be left tottering? Contrasting with the tidy composition of the Eclogues piece, these boots were clearly pulled from various junked garments, and seem on the verge of collapsing to pieces again. Both boots merge shoes and handbags, the handles in Puzzlecut Boot Oxblood curving around like a pull strap and shoelaces, while Puzzlecut Boot Black has one curling over its front toe like a probing appendage (and obvious tripping hazard). Especially striking is Puzzlecut Boot Oxblood’s use of stacked formalwear shoes to make its tongue, a stray handbag label jutting across their dark contour. Contrastingly, Puzzlecut Boot Black seems to have originated in a sleek trainer; now layered with excessive flourishes it takes a moment to parse. String (this time black) makes an appearance again, tenuously binding together the various heels of both boots, threaded through zippers and buckles. This crowding of newly appropriated ornaments and sartorial structures hints at the disintegrative nature of the disposal sites that this material would usually fill. With Puzzlecut Boot Black, handbag strap-grips and ornamentation also seem to have been repurposed as binding. One form dissolves into the next.