Hello!
For some months now the Blank Noise Project team (that's all you guys!) has
been working on the clothes campaign. We are looking to collect a minimum of
1,000 clothes that women were wearing when they were sexually harassed and
string these together in an installation at a public site and will
eventually travel across many cities. The variety of the clothes we're
getting (salwar kameezes to tank tops) defies the notion that by wearing a
particular kind of clothing, a woman "asks for it". Street sexual harassment
is a universal phenomenon. Whenever an incident of 'eve teasing' or street
sexual harassment takes place, the first thing most women themselves and the
listeners to the incident ask is ' what was she wearing?' , did she 'provoke
him'?
Blank Noise also believes that women do have a right to feel good about
themselves, and wear what they please, without being sexually violated,
because 'you' think she's 'available'. We question, defy, and attempt to put
an end to the argument that women 'ask for it'. To establish 'asking for it'
as a mere excuse for sexual harassment, we are asking all women to send in
one garment that they wore when they were 'eve teased'.
Each contributed garment comes from someone's incident as a testimony, or a
witness and forms part of a larger collective.
You could chose to send text, describing yourself, or the incident along
with the garment.
Other than clothes being collected in the Blank Noise cities, Mumbai, Delhi,
Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad we have people from other cities
volunteering to spread the word, collect garments and have them delivered to
us. To volunteer as your city clothes collector, email us.
Amongst the clothes collection we have Asiya's salwar kameez from
Baramulla, Kashmir ( Naveed Saraf is collecting garments) . We also have and Suren, a
design student who brought back 24 (yes, 24!!) clothes from Chennai! We also
have Rani Kamal collecting clothes in the Andamans , Jimmy in Jaipur, Runa B
in Pune and Christina in Singapore! Which goes to show that the count is
finally increasing the way it should - each of you is acting as an agent!
The clothing count is up on the blog and we're really stepping up efforts to
get in as many clothes as possible. A formal public campaign asking for
clothes will be in place soon, but till then each of you needs to just bring
in as much as you can... even just four clothes for us to hit that magic
number of 1000!
So, yes, Blank Noise Project needs you!
Thankyou!
The Blank Noise Team
To directly send us the clothes, email us and we will give you the postal add.
