Coenobium of Cessation: tailoring dispositions of the bourgeois desire

21.1 hackney

How are they so intensely overcome by greed, taking, owning? They own me. All I want is to feed my family back home, but my body is aching, pressed against the skin they look at me so differently for. It’s not the skin I chose and it’s not the skin I own. They won’t t repair me when I break, they only know replacement. I guess I’ll just wait until then.

I will wait here, in this Coenobium - a community with monastic quality ungoverned by desire - where the cessation of excess permeates.

It is a place that explores the disconnection between society and their garments through empowerment of sweatshop workers in Hackney, London. Though at the forefront of the fashion industry, London is no exception to the reality of human labour commodified as a by-product of bourgeois society. Employing the values of reupholsters Neil and Thomas, this Coenobium reimagines sweatshop workers as teachers - who will guide locals in their craft of silk making and tailor the dispositions of a society that has little understanding of the resources and craftsmanship required behind the completed products they have come to know.

Lucy Jenkins