in itself.
As a fashion event the Swap-O-Rama-Rama is intentionally without any artistic
leadership, but instead facilitates the widest possible participation and symbiotic
potential to be actualized. The goal is to trigger joint synergetic exaltation of the
visitors as they engage in furthering their skills and aesthetic knowledge together.
With the Swap’s sharing of resources and material it becomes a radical democratic
event where everyone builds on an allocated pool of assets on equal terms. This
challenges one of the foundations of fashion – its celebration of exclusivity, of be-
ing something for the chosen few. Instead, the Swap is about wide participation
and the shared luxury of advancing your aesthetic skills in companionship with
your friends.
It is this last step that is the radical contribution of the Swap-O-Rama-Rama. It is
not only sharing clothes and redesigning them, or even sharing skills, working to-
gether and making new friends. The Swap is radical because it creates a new fash-
ion, a new scene, and makes visitors proud of being a practical part of that scene. It
is a scene built by the people coming to the event, participating and sharing. It is
not a scene built by a brand, an advertising agency or a sudden hype of a lifestyle
mediated through the mass media, but a scene where all participants build equal
parts in forming it. The procedures, the garments, the techniques, the styles, their
own catwalk, all components are part of this new scene, equally accessible and
commonly constructed. All these interacting parts form the multitude that makes
the Swap-O-Rama-Rama scene fashion-able.
This means that the participants did not only leave the event with freshly exchanged
garments, but with new skills and a freshly established common scene. They had
new with whom they shared similar ideas and values and with whom they had
built a common self-esteem, by using the redesign event as a process for self-en-
hancement.
Yet, even for the Swap, the symbiosis with the bigger fashion system is vital. It needs
the surplus and it benefits from the energy from successfully mimicking high fash-
ion. It does not build an oppositional resistance, but a bigger multitude of small
scenes and practices. It does not say NO, but instead wants MORE. This is also a
type of resistance.
MORE fashionable resistance
Perhaps it is with the Swap-O-Rama-Rama we can image a mindset of resistance
that echoes of an affirmative “YES!” rather than an oppositional and countercul-
tural “NO!” This would be a form of resistance that allows the abstract machine of
hacktivism to roam more freely and not be trapped between dialectic ideological
positions. An invitation to participate in renegotiations rather than exclude or
blindly oppose is quite like the non-dialectic resistance discussed earlier by De-
leuze (2006a). As proposed by Christine Harold in OurSpace (2007), the question
is not to jam the system, but to jam with the system.
The intention of intersecting the small action or gesture with larger wholes is a key
feature when trying to understand the connection between hacking, rhizomatic
organization and social change. This is also a key difference from just any gesture
or the singular massive manifestation of “NO!”. As opposed to the NO, the YES can
turn into a MORE, as theorist Mika Hannula proposes in his strategy of MORE