Watch THE LAST FASHION show here:
Animated movie by Evaristti and animator Sara Koppel based on drawings by Texas Death Row inmate Gene Hathorn and with music composed by Kenneth Thordal to a poem by Hathorn:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk6W1i06uwc
More music composed by Thordal to Hathorn´s poems:
The Last Fashion is a collection inspired by the death penalty and designed for inmates on the American Death Row to wear on their execution day. The collection was revealed August 9th 2008 at a spectacular fashion show in Skuespilhuset, Copenhagen, during Copenhagen Fashion Week 08, and this week the show is completed with an exhibition at Martin Asbæk Projects, Copenhagen.
Fashion communicates. Fashion gives us the opportunity and the right to show who we are as individuals. Fashion can show who we are, where we are coming from and what we believe in.
The Last Fashion brings focus on the death penalty in the US. Death row prisoners have no longer the right to act as individuals. They are isolated. It is of no interest who they are, where they are coming from and what they believe in. They are already dead.
The collection, The Last Fashion, is a unique design that offers the forgotten, hidden person to make an individual choice, dying, not as ”the inhuman other”, but as a human like any other. Thus the collection will be sold as the last set of clothes to death row prisoners. In accordance with US prison budgets the clothes are sold at a prize of USD 39,95.
During the course of working with the collection, Evaristti has visited Gene Hathorn, an inmate on Texas Death Row. Processing through a slow and bureaucratic system drawings and poems by Hathorn has since then been sent to Evaristti. These things are incorporated in Evaristti´s work, thus opening and putting forward what is hidden, untold of and isolated.
The Last Fashion is Marco Evaristti´s contribution to individualizing forgotten human beings thereby undermining the anonymous death.
Next project: MEAL
From Evaristti´s “A journey Into the American Nightmare”:
“...After my day with Gene, I thought about my visit to the cemetery on the morning of my first visit and now I knew a person who would end up there. How bizarre and meaningless. He was an individual, not a number. I got an idea. We could do more than getting his poems and drawings out of this isolated and closed place. We could do something that would really open the eyes of the public to the atrocity of the death penalty. He could donate his dead body, once executed, to me in order for me to preserve it and make it into fish food. The fish food should then be part of an installation consisting of a huge aquarium, the can of fish food and an invitation for people to feed the fish....
...I told him about my rather bizarre idea and immediately he was in on it. He even said that having been considered human trash most of his life this was a chance for him to do good – by letting the fish feed of him, and even by being recycled as opposed to most trash. For me it made sense too, in its own way – I was once accused of being a fish killer – I could now make amends. I asked him if he was nervous that the attention his testament might stir would affect the way he was treated in prison, but he said that they couldn´t do anything to him they hadn´t already done. “If it can help the debate, Marco, it´s okay with me. I don´t give a shit when I´m executed.”
I know that people will say that I am guilty of unseemly conduct with a corpse, but I sincerely cannot see how this could be worse than a state killing a perfectly healthy, living person – something I would call unseemly conduct with a living body...”
