Emily Chooi

"Children and grandchildren burn incense to invite their ancestors and belated parents on special occasions. Because we were made to believe that was the way to pay our respects and gratitude. We burn or send to our ancestors and belated parents depending on their lifestyle and necessities. If they liked to play football when they were alive, we burn a ball to them. Our father liked to play chess every day, so we burnt a set of chess for him so he could carry on playing. We also believe they send messages to us through dreams. We dreamt about our parents' house falling apart and they felt so cold, so we sent some warm clothing and a new house to them. Normally we dream about them before special occasions. Whatever your parents need, you send them, paper money, paper clothes, paper bags, and paper gold."

Beginning with the stratum of a single pair of hands - remaking the garment as a counterfeit leads to a large-scale logistical reconfiguration. What workshop space is the garment made in? How are materials and the finished product delivered, to whom, and how is it distributed? Reimagining the garment, the workshop, modes of delivery, and platforms of distribution. 

This project is placed within Vietnam, which holds one of the largest export garment manufacturing industries and is becoming more attractive to multinational companies due to cheaper labour and free trade agreements. From factory to bodies, our garments make journeys tens of thousands of miles in the process of production. 

The physical disconnect of dispersed management and labour perpetuates an emotive disconnect between those in charge and those employed. Someone somewhere bears the load of the whole system. These local-global tensions create logistical paradoxes that benefit consumers and captains of industry at the expense of labourer’s quality of life. 

Within the intervention, there are two streams of counterfeit fashioned for different worlds. The counterfeit for life. A part of a line of counterfeits that get incorporated into existing chains of distribution. The counterfeit for the afterlife, a ritualistic offering.

Currently, within the cities, the pace of production is constrained by conditions of formality. Engineered around cheap labour, material availability, and quotas to fill. Moving beyond these contingent restraints, this proposal operates in the handicraft village. Since the “Doi Moi” period in the 80s, craft villages have seen a resurgence due to market liberalisation. The proposed site of production is located amongst a cluster of three villages that specialise in sewing and are in the outskirts of Hanoi. Clusters of villages makeup craft co-operatives and are linked together along waterways transporting on boats between them. Recouping labour practices via a deployable, smaller-scale operation allows garment workers to pursue these casual relationships. Work is divided up and each village fulfills a stage of the production. Villages function as nodes within the supply chain, relying on one another for materials, skill, production space, and workforce. 

Belonging to the informal sector means employment is flexible and can easily adapt to market demands or conditions of production. Aware they need to modernise to access new markets, the villages took ownership of equipment, buying and reclaiming them to continue production at home. They often use found or recycled materials as opposed to resourcing raw materials, which could be too difficult or expensive to obtain. 

Communities come together in the handicraft villages to perform ancient rituals celebrating ancestors, guardian spirits, or protective genies that helped them learn the craft. As a community of care, they look after the dead who still need material things in the afterlife. Rituals and festivals are held after the lunar new year and revolve around the ceremony of burning the imitation or the fake. They are burnt as offerings and the deceased receive them via smoke. 

Much like the revival of handicraft villages, festivals were also once seen as illegal activities in the 40s. The idea of the proposed counterfeit plays with notions of legality, the project seeks to define itself within these illegitimate loopholes.

Amongst the twists and turns of the river bed,  we trace the edges of the site to approach one of the many entrances of the workshop. A tectonic shift from constrained conditions of the factory settings to the freeing landscapes of craft. The skin of the workshop is left open to be malleable to the occupant. Vast structures billow over the ground that comes alive with the hands of creators. Life lived outside opens up possibilities for public cohesion. There has to be more to life than purely production. The workshop will be the backdrop to collaborate and socialise among makers - blurring boundaries between work, family time, and community.  Rather than part of the human conveyor belt, space shared allows for the sharing of lives. We see the workshop operating without the presence of bodies, where trails of life hinted at. The aesthetics are glitching into the other world as it is injected with celestial magic; an abstraction of boundaries between mortal and immortal worlds. A comment on the invisibility of labour - work is unseen, unnoticed and unacknowledged.  

The space vibrates from the rhythm of makers, the sporadic pulsing of crafting instead of the humdrum tones of producing. Breaking down the fibres of the harvested fashion waste and excess, extracting the found materials as they are refined into recycled paper.

Acting as an unauthorised collection of western commodities, the counterfeit for life emerges out of the mundane. Taking precedent from the fashion house collection of everyday capitalist chic with DHL and Ikea, this garment plays on the infamous Hermès Birkin bag. Leaning on the multiple uses of the name Hermes between the fashion house, the delivery company, and the God of trade and thieves, it repurposes fashion excess and used delivery packaging to craft a copy of the Birkin bag. Using the language of mimicry and the unauthorised in the glitch of the counterfeit to disrupt existing supply chains. Rather than a by-product of faceless factory figures, garments are given their own identity and rebuilt through creative modifications. Concoctions become so departed from the original, it overcomes the definition of copy and the mutated variation assumes originals of their own.

The other counterfeit is an emblem, a ritualistic offering to connect with the dead and admired spirits. Within Vietnamese culture, the tradition is burning votive papers or hang ma to show respect to the dead. Acting as collective catharsis,  the ritual ensures loved ones are cared for in the afterlife. The spiritual realm is seen to be equal to this life and is not free of materialistic goods. Many families create life after death, constructing imitations as votive offerings including modern houses, clothes, jewellery, bags and currency. The current industry burns large quantities of this paper emitting a cocktail of harmful substances because of the nature of printed ink and plastic. By reusing paper packaging and breaking it down into pulp form to then be fashioned into a crafted offering, contests current levels of sustainability in this industry.

So in the glitch of the counterfeit, there is a reconfiguration of the supply chain. Supporting villages and garment workers to reclaim agency over their labour. It is an infrastructure to support already existing processes, allowing makers to come together and overlap aspects of all life. The intervention’s programmatic incompleteness allows for the unpredictable and leaves room for inhabitants to shape it. Acting as infinite nodes within a network allows for the continuous growth of other links and logistics.