Matrushka Fashion is a fashion brand
from Los Angeles that, on top of their stand-
ard collections, arrange T-construction nights
with special themes. During these events they
assemble and produce T-shirts from ready-
made parts together with their visitors, quite
similar to collaborative Lego-style production.
Visitors hang around in good company, with
drinks and music, while an assembly line is
created where the various parts of the T-shirts
are put together according to your will. With
or without your help.
In Matrushka’s example the production
process of every garment is made transparent
and open for intervention, and the assembly
itself is made into an event. The value of the
new garment is created from the bottom up
through the open participation in the event, the
assembly process, and the community brought
together to share and develop their designs.• Mobilizing resources: Reorganize production, open new action spaces by
recircuiting the existing ones. Use the possibilities of what is considered as junk, mak-
ing the leftovers of society your pool of treasures.• Provoking the “taken-for-grantedness”: Help to make the virtual or possible imagi-
nable and discussable. Make models and visionary prototypes. Challenge the partici-
pants’ imagination.• Making micro-plans: Think in small steps, plan small, but be open for serendipity.
Make examples of how the single informal action might be turned into a stabilized
activity and a sustainable project or business, at least resulting in richness of dignity
and self-respect. Map relations and prototype protocols.• Forming alliances: Engage participants, share resources and skills, collaborate and
build assemblages together. Be a rhizome, a pack of wolves, a swarm of rats. But be
conscious of its risks and take seriously the responsibilities it demands.• Intensifying the power: Plug the project into a larger energy system, use its poten-
tiality, connect with other lines and ride their shared power, boost the flows, accelerate
the participation, celebrate a shared re-engagement.All these aspects require a large portion of idealism as well as hands-on pragma-
tism, applying adaptive imagination to look into unknown fields for interdiscipli-
nary building and mobilizing of assets. The process is open-ended and explorative.
It has no big plan but we learn as we go along, and also from our allies and the
examples set by others. The uncertainty is also the advantage of the method. As
Nabeel Hamdi (2004) encouragingly says, we should embrace uncertainty and use
it for exploration; “not knowing [...] leaves space to think creatively, uncertainty
gives room to think” (Hamdi 2004: 39).