RAGS#6

Artist: Patrizia Zelano

Year/Location: 2010 Italy

Dimensions: Approx 90cm x 60cm

Photos: Photograph

Materials: Print Ink-jet on fine art paper Hanhemulhe

Description:

Cenci [Rags] Patrizia Zelano's 2010 photographic series entitled Cenci [Rags] depicts bales of used clothing. Secondhand clothing fuels a billion-dollar-a-year, global industry. Millions of tons of used clothing are discarded by the world's richest nations and are sold to some of the poorest. Zelano's photographs of sorted, graded, compacted, and baled clothing become powerful metaphors for excess and waste, abject poverty and need. At the same time, the individual bundles containerize past lives as concentrated and compressed layers of social significance, fashion and status, now recycled on an industrial scale to be sorted and shipped for reuse by the poor, changing hands dozens of times while benefitting brokers, bundlers, exporters, importers, shippers, traders, merchants and peddlers. In different ways, each of Zelano's photographs underscores the interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Nature is harvested and packaged as hay bales in Attesa Silente [Quiet Wait]. Bundled old clothes are recycled to third-world markets in Cenci [Rags]). Dead animals and slaughterhouse waste is rendered into meat-by-products and animal feed in In Carne ed Ossa [In Flesh and Blood]. These images remind us of society's consumption and discards, and record the uncomfortable consequences of negotiating with nature. Wendy M. Blazier Senior Curator Boca Raton Museum of Art