Arts Network Exhibitions
Made in Siam
Made in Siam
Opening Reception: Friday 1 July, 5.00-9.00 pm.
Installation Hours:
Friday 1/7/11 3pm-9pm
Saturday 2/7/11 1pm – 7.30pm Sunday 3/7/11 1pm – 7.30pm
Founded in 2003 by former sweatshop workers who were illegally dismissed from their factory without compensation, Dignity Returns has operated as a worker-managed garment cooperative for the past 8 years. The cooperative’s 15-person membership rotates all factory duties and makes all factory decisions collectively, following a model of production that is transparent, egalitarian, and autonomous.
Dignity Returns has forged alliances with several other collectives worldwide, including the Indonesian art-activist group Taring Padi, which supplies the factory with woodcut designs to be used for shirts supporting labor rights campaigns, and La Alameda, a worker cooperative based in Argentina, with whom the factory jointly produces the No Chains brand of sweat-free garments. While maintaining these international ties of mutual aid and global solidarity, Dignity Returns still strives to make its cooperative principles felt within Thailand, among consumers of garments, advocates of labor rights, and supporters of workers’ self-management.
Made in Siam is an installation at BKK Arthouse, through which the Dignity Returns cooperative seeks to make its production public, moving machines, cutting tables, and irons from its Bangbon-based facility to the gallery space within the Bangkok Art and Culture Center. In the midst of Siam Square’s shops and offices, Dignity Returns members will operate their makeshift workshop according to those same basic cooperative principles that have kept their factory strong for nearly a decade.
BKK Arthouse and the factory invite everyone to visit its temporary production center during the weekend of July 1st -3rd to meet cooperative members, watch them create No Chains t-shirts, and learn more about the cooperative’s principles of dignified labor and democratic decision-making.
The opening party at 5pm on July 1st will serve as a launch event for a new line of No Chains shirts, jointly produced between Dignity Returns and its partner factory La Alameda, based in Buenos Aires. Dignity Returns is pleased to announce that La Alameda co-founder Gustavo Vera will be in attendance at this event, giving a brief presentation on the 2001 popular rebellion that continues to animate the art, politics, and economics of Argentina to this day. Gustavo Vera co-founded the No Chains global network of worker cooperatives after a visit to Dignity Returns in Bangkok in March 2009. He is one of the core labor activists in the factory occupations movement that began in Argentina in 2001-2002.
