70 Pound Robe
The Unpacking the Bale project consisted of an archaeological examination of a 1,000 lbs. bale of post-consumer clothing from the Goodwill Outlet of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin County. Until recently, post-consumer clothing and discard have been given little attention in the social sciences, though clothing waste continues to be a mounting global issue. Previous studies of clothing disposal have primarily relied on surveys and interviews based in consumer-behavior studies. Reported consumer behavior, however, neglects to account for our underlying material engagements with clothing waste, precluding critical insights into how our literal relationship to things fundamentally influences the way they move through and actively shape our world. In focusing on questions of materiality, the process of Unpacking is grounded in traditional archaeological methodology; it breaks from conventional modes of knowledge production, however, by engaging in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of Art/Archaeology. Rather than solely focus on numeric and descriptive data collected through the cataloging process, Karin Dahl additionally emphasized the sensorial and inter-subjective information and experience of excavating the bale, thus informing a polyvalent research outcome that aims to more dynamically connect people with their waste. 70 Pound Robe is an art piece and garment constructed of remnants from the 1,000 lb. bale, exhibited as a component of the Unpacking the Bale project in May 2018. The robe weighing literally 70 lbs. is the amount of clothing discarded in the United States annually, per person. It is meant to be worn and experienced, serving as a kind of disruption in the ways people connect to discarded clothing while evoking new ways of experiencing archaeological knowledge.
For more information on this project see the following:
Dahl, K. 2018. Unpacking the Bale: an Archive of Post-Consumer Clothing. MA Thesis, Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State University.