Work-in-Progress Sharing: The Denim Opera

We are happy to invite you to the work-in-progress showing of THE DENIM OPERA of Tamar Levit & Yaën S. Levi on Thursday the 12th of March at 16:00 at workspacebrussels.

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.

Their last endeavor, is dedicated to workers’ voices; it takes the shape of a choir operating as a method of solidarity — inviting (ex-)workers and (now) Özak resistance members in Turkey to compose, write, sing and let their stories resonate, illuminating the dark folds of pockets.

The opera weaves together lived experiences, sung narratives, labor, exhaustion, and material chronicles that shift into myth — stories that open up and resist closure.

Tamar Levit and Yaën S. Levi work their way around the seam lines of fashion, design research, and performance art to speculate on how personal, social and political systems manifest themselves through clothing. They move through the histories and appearances of wearables — clothing, dress codes, uniforms — items not authored by a single designer or protected by a patent, but shaped through the slow evolution and restless mutations of society at large. They construct poetic–spatial–ritualistic (sometimes wearable) formats, allowing the accumulated histories to assume structure, volume, and the counter space around one’s body.