‘Cloth(ing) the Green: An Ode to Nature’s Future’ is a collaborative project by Ghanaian artists Sel Kofiga and Kevin Kwabia examining climate change from the perspective of the personal: your wardrobe, the clothes on your back, the space in which you roam and interact. Accra-based Kofiga works across a variety of disciplines including multimedia, performance and regenerative fashion through The Slum Studio. And for his latest collection of upcycled, hand-dyed pieces, he turned to photographer Kwabia to help him capture the clothes in a setting that would express his alarm at the visible impact that the fashion industry is having on the environment of everyday Ghanaians. Debuting here on Nataal, we sat down with the pair for an intimate conversation around the themes and motivations that drive the work.

Nataal: Can you sum up for us the essence of The Slum Studio.

Sel: The Slum Studio is a brand and creative community which is interested in the politics of clothing and wear. Through art and photo documentary, we create a visual dialogue surrounding second-hand clothing redistribution by creating hand-painted textile and wearable art out of fabric waste. With this collection, I wanted to look at the juxtaposition between a green space and an urban space and how that interacts with fashion, how we use clothes and what we do with them when we’re done with wearing them and how that affects our environment.

Nataal: How did you two originally connect?

Sel: Kevin and I met at a mutual friend’s dinner. He’s a cool guy and when I saw his work, I thought he captured landscapes in a very interesting way. One of his images I saw on my friend’s wall had a really striking story, like being in a ghost town where you feel presence but at the same time you feel absence and I really connected to it.

Kevin: You are overselling me a bit! (Laughs) At the mutual friend’s dinner he described how he wanted to approach the whole project and I saw that this is not like the standard fashion shoot where you concentrate on the clothes; this had more of a concentration on the environment and the location. We shot at the Aburi Botanical Gardens, which is a beautiful place in the Eastern region of Ghana that is usually looked at from a very touristic perspective. But even within that, we found some plants and spots that no one else would have thought of. So even if the project can result in the greater preservation of that area, that will be a very good thing.

Sel: I wanted to see how pieces would be draped on the body and then positioned in this space. I was playing with how you can use a green space to convey circularity - our circular relationship with clothes and our spaces. How could I create a living sculpture piece with my clothes in this location? One of the beautiful things on this project was that we were bringing this work into a natural habitat and had to deal with everything that it gives us, which inspired me to think about how we are not paying attention to nature, and we approach this in our everyday life.

Nataal: What can you tell us about the collection?

Sel: When I start any collection, I start with a colour. For this one, it was green and interestingly my surname means green. How do I personally resonate with the colour green, what does it mean to me in this specific time that we are living in? The intention was to create a consciousness with the public on what fashion contributes to preserving our environment. We know how alarming it is that things that are produced outside of our country is sent here to landfills. But the ordinary Ghanaian doesn’t connect to this conversation on climate change. Around 10 percent of global emissions come from the fashion industry and I wanted to convey that message.

Nataal: So, in a way it is political.

Sel: Yes. The clothes are all handmade and customised and every piece has a different detail, which all comes together to form the story. The colours and the symbols are all references to Accra’s Kantamanto market, the largest second-hand clothing market in West Africa, where the bales of used fabric from around the world are brought in for sale, and from which I create these clothes. I then print, hand draw and hand-paint onto the clothes, and once everything is done, I cut them and re-join them into new pieces.

Nataal: What is the measure of success of the project?

Sel: Fashion has become very boring in terms of how we don’t pay attention to how much we are consuming and how that will affect our future. So, it’s about creating an environmental consciousness for people about their relationship to what they do and fashion is one of the mediums for that. It’s getting people to think about what they wear next will affect the environment. But that creates an inevitable conflict between art that is not meant for consumption or ownership versus commerciality.

Kevin: We live in a very commercial society and there isn’t much that we can do about how people approach or relate to objects, whether through ownership, purchase or exchange. For me, it was important to document what we had to document. When you do that, the hope is that it will gain a platform. So, someone buys the clothes or these image, which means there would have been a conversation and as a consumer you are contributing to that conversation and some improvements can come out of it.

Sel: If people end up owning the pieces and hanging them on their wall, or a grandma storing the clothes in their trunks with all the other textiles that they value, I am honoured by that. I do, though, want to create something that allows the person to see that we have a rich ancient technique in what we produce. But to what Kevin said, fashion has succeeded in making the consumer want to constantly buy - this is what is fuelling fast fashion. And most of these things end up in our spaces. In a research findings conducted by The OR Foundation, Ghana imports close to 15million used garments within a week, and there is the probability that between 60-80 percent of this would end up in land fills in Accra and neighbouring cities, dumped or incinerated.

Nataal: What are your plans for the project?

Sel: It will be presented in both conventional and unconventional methods. The first is an exhibition that allows everyone to get in touch with the work. Posters will be put up in sites around Accra and there will be questions asked of people that they can answer on the poster: what are they wearing now, what will they wear tomorrow, what will happen after they wear the clothes? Secondly, there will be an exhibition where we get to showcase the pieces and the pictures in a physical location. And lastly, the 60 pieces in the collection will be available to buy online, in select stores in Ghana, the Ivory Coast, the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan.