The Denim Opera

The Denim Opera is an ongoing research and artistic project tracing the deep seams of the denim industry — its labor, resistance, and the material’s joy and exhaustion. Jeans, omnipresent, are both tangible objects central to industrial and economic exchanges and an analogy — mediators connecting bodies, objects, spaces, and cities.

The pursuit of the perfect pair links consumers and producers, forming a global community entangled in fast fashion and governmental contractors that exploit labor and safety. Over the past two years, Tamar Levit and Yaën Levi have listened to designers, makers, wearers, activists, lawyers, doctors, coffee-readers, indigo dye, and pumice stones in tumble drums.

The current act is dedicated to workers’ voices: to the Özak factory (Levi’s mammoth producers) in ŞanliUrfa, and to broader textile labor realities in Türkiye. It takes the shape of a choir operating as a method of solidarity — inviting (ex-)workers and (now) Özak resistance members to compose, speak, and let their stories resonate, illuminating the dark folds of pockets.

The opera intricately weaves a polyphony of diverse narratives and temporalities involving people and entities. Embracing the grandiosity of the medium, it provides a spectacular fantasy to imagine post-capitalist endings, unmasks real villains, and stitches collective breath into the work.