Silent Polyglot

Stephanie Rizaj’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses installation, sculpture, video and textile works, and draws on her reflections on identity, commodification, and belonging. In examining such issues in the context of our globalised present, she combines the quotidian with broader considerations of capitalist modes of production, creating material metaphors that reveal the complex interrelations between us and the world. A recurrent theme in her oeuvre is the subject of clothes and their production, circulation, and afterlife: the manner and location of garment assembly and sale, the process by which garments accrue value, and the subsequent loss of that value.

Silent Polyglot is a modular system that evokes the organisation of shelves found in fabric shops. Carpets, which have been rolled up, appear to levitate, adapting to the shape of bolts of fabric. Enlarged reproductions of labels taken from garments are attached to them like price tags. The labels are only visible from the reverse, where the threads of the woven logos form abstract colour compositions and company names turn into illegible patterns. These suspended objects alter the perception of the gallery and activate its spatial configuration. However, rather than transforming the space into a shop-like interior, they bring the concept of commodity fetishism into play, exploring how meaning and value become embedded in objects, thereby transforming them.

In a globalised production logistics environment, various stages of fabrication are geographically dispersed across continents. Product traverses multiple countries before acquiring their supposed national identity. The majority of clothing brands have relocated their manufacturing operations to regions that offer low production costs, irrespective of the conditions experienced by the workforce and the wages they receive. Yet, when the final visible stage of production – attaching the brand’s label – takes place in Europe, clothes can be tagged as European, signifying their association with quality and value. The clothing label with the brand name thus functions as a sign of origin suggesting national unity where, in reality, extended travels across countries have taken place.

The labels employed by Rizaj in her installation are sourced from second-hand garments that have already experienced a loss of their original price. The pieces that cannot be sold often end up in vast third-hand markets in Ghana or Nigeria, adding another geographical and economic shift to their history. These items do not disappear, but reappear elsewhere. In this respect, they are part of global movements – ‚silent polyglots’, carrying, like people, various languages, contexts and stories within them.

Their labels tell parts of these stories: perhaps manufactured in Bangladesh, processed in Europe, sold as luxury items, worn, given away, passed on. Products, akin to people, constitute components of extensive systems and infrastructures, production chains, and shifts. Concepts of origin, identity and the values attributed to them are presented as fixed, but actually they are nothing but fluid categorizations. 

The image of fabrics floating in space and waiting to be transformed into garments represents this intrinsic interconnection. Each tag possesses a distinct quality in terms of its abstract pattern, highlighting and simultaneously concealing those aspects that lie beyond the surface.

Curated by Vanessa Joan Müller