A few days before Rana Plaza building collapse, I looked at the label on one of my son’s shirts. “Made in Bangladesh”, it read. I thought, in passing, about the people who made that shirt: who cut the fabric; did the buttons and stitches; how many fractions of a penny it had earned them.

The shirt probably cost me $12.99.

Target took its cut of profit; the manufacturer must have made a killing.

For whatever reason, I felt a pang of consciousness that morning. I assuaged it by saying a little thank you, hoping that it would echo across the universe and land as a whisper in that someone’s ear. I just hoped that someone wasn’t a child.

Knowing as little as I did about the garment industry, I’d thought child labor was the worst of it.

I thought my evanescent gratitude was enough to reconcile my complacency.

Upon seeing Taslima Akhter’s devastating photograph, however, I learned more about the people behind that label; that ‘someone’ who might have spent a passing moment caressing the cloth that caressed my son’s back.

She was a mother. (Someone else’s mother.) She was a sister. (Someone else’s sister.) She was a daughter. (Someone else’s daughter.)

Who she was to him, that man reaching across terror, across imminent death, to envelope her in a final embrace, I can only speculate.

A stranger? A relative? An employee? A friend?

A Bangladeshi activist and photographer, Akhter writes the following about the photograph, which appears in this week’s TIME International:

I spent the entire day the building collapsed on the scene, watching as injured garment workers were being rescued from the rubble. I remember the frightened eyes of relatives — I was exhausted both mentally and physically. Around 2 a.m., I found a couple embracing each other in the rubble. The lower parts of their bodies were buried under the concrete. The blood from the eyes of the man ran like a tear. When I saw the couple, I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I knew them — they felt very close to me. I looked at who they were in their last moments as they stood together and tried to save each other — to save their beloved lives.

Every time I look back to this photo, I feel uncomfortable — it haunts me. It’s as if they are saying to me, we are not a number — not only cheap labor and cheap lives. We are human beings like you. Our life is precious like yours, and our dreams are precious too.

Certainly their lives were as precious to someone else as my son’s life is to me.

The morning I put the $12.99 shirt on him, I gave him a hug and a kiss as I always do after we get dressed. I wonder if it occurred to me then that his Made In Bangladesh shirt spent more time embracing my boy that day than I did? After seeing Akhter’s photograph, it certainly occurs to me now.

Pat Robertson says we outta pray over the clothes we buy in thrift shops in case demons should linger in the stitches and buttons. I believe Robertson is in possession of a fantastically paranoid imagination when it comes to most of the things he espouses, but I do believe that fabric is capable of its own kind of memory.

Akhter’s photograph merely captured that memory in pixels. A memory of a mother, a daughter, a sister and her friend at the end trapped in a final embrace. More than a whispered thank you echoing across the universe, it’s a silent scream demanding a response across the globe.

Though we mothers/consumers dress our children with love each and every morning, the time has come for us to purchase their clothing with equal awareness.

—

This post also appeared on Huffington Post, Global Motherhood.

LA-based multidisciplinary artist Carolina Fontoura Alzaga produces what she calls “reflections and documents of…shifting realities” inspired by her tri-cultural upbringing in Mexico, Brazil and the USA. Referencing tricycles at this stage would seem a natural progression, given that these functional sculptures are made from the cast-off remains of bicycles. But that would render frivolous the perspective she brings to her art of salvaging objects of disuse and beautifying them into objets d’art.

Her chandelier series, called CONNECT, borrows from the aesthetic of Victorian chandeliers and welds it to contemporary DIY and urban bike culture.

The artist explains:

“This series addresses class codes, power dynamics, reclaimed agency, and ecological responsibility. The traditional chandelier is seen as a bourgeois commodity, a cachet of affluence, excess, and as such, power. The recycled bicycle parts become a representation of the dismissed, invisible, and powerless, but are also an affirmation of self-propelled movement.”

These objects are subversive, then, challenging “the necessity of new” and defying our concepts of wealth, affluence, trash and art.

Here’s Carolina sourcing materials from junkyards  and upcycling them in her studio on the outskirts of LA.

This post originally appeared on EcoSalon, where I was the Shelter Editor. Click here for more…

Sin ti, soy yo…without you, I am: the díga(monster) reincarnated.

I’d like to welcome you to the new Díga(Mama)! What happened to the old díga, you ask? Well, a series of unfortunate technical mishaps that have plagued díga(yo) since August 2012 have forced her into early retirement over here, on the rump of my professional website.

Loyal readers (hi mom) will have no doubt noticed that I have a penchant for changing díga’s look with the same level of vigour I once exhibited with my hair; first she was red, then she was pink. She went modern for a while, grew a conscious and became eco; then disintegrated again into snarkiness. She was momentarily media savvy, and made an attempt at mommy blog normalcy, but none of it seemed to stick. My díga(blog) had taken on the consistency of soggy wallpaper; too many coats of glue slathered onto a pattern that had no business in my bedroom in the first place. If that doesn’t make any sense, that’s fine. Even as I wrote that sentence the words “prevaricate” and “equivocate” both sprung to mind, though I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to use them properly within the context of this blog post. That’s the truth. I’d like to be sort of blogger who could squeeze into transitive verbs like that, just as I long to wear my pre-kid pair of Joe’s. But neither is happening, not for a very long time.

So what is the new Díga all about?

Here’s what it’s not: the díga(blog) started out as “equal parts travelogue and mommy blog” — all very well and good — but the truth of the matter is I tend not to read mommy blogs…the same holds true for travelogues. Besides, I get homesick and don’t want to remain an expat forever. Moreover, I start to feel queasy when I find myself over self-identifying as a mommy. This summer I replaced my Facebook pic (a very cute one of me with my kid) with one of me on my very own, and I tell you what — it was bracing!

My goal is to helm a blog that is as much about being a mom as it about being myself…to reflect my own interests as a writer, a woman, a creator and curator. 

That’s what the new Díga is all about.

The old díga(blog).

What kind of sh*t can I find on the new Díga?

Certainly not pretty sh*t. I started touting that tagline around version 2.0, but that was merely a reflection of my previous post as Shelter editor of a now defunct website. Dare I say my design blog days are over given that I’m gainfully unemployed from that gig. It was a rather unnatural fit, I realized the other day as I walked out of my house in pink tennis shoes and velvet sweat pants. I caught a reflection of myself in a shop window and said, “what kind of f*ckery is this?” When did I become everything I hated about suburban Maryland?

Around the time I started mommy blogging, I suppose. And illegally downloading the Real Housewives franchise. I guess you could say I stopped caring about pretty sh*t many years ago, though blog about it I tried.

díga(footer), when she was hip and lowercase.

So, um…what kind of sh*t can I expect to find on the new Díga?

But above all, I hope to contribute something worthwhile to the internet, something pragmatic and useful about the things I do give a sh*t about, like: books, children’s literacy, grown-up cultural literacy, the writing life. Let’s start with that…

What remains the same about Díga(Mama)?

That takes me back to the original purpose of this blog, a guiding principle I would do well to return to again in my blogging and in the way I conduct my life as a mother, writer and all-around good neighbor. My very first tagline — my favorite, in fact, was this:

Tell me, mama…can we do this with some alma?

Well kiddies…I’m sure gonna try. Welcome(back).

The internet has been abuzz with the recent revelation that House Hunters and House Hunters International aren’t as real as they purport to be. Via Slate:

Earlier this week on the website Hooked on Houses, formerHouse Hunters participant Bobi Jensen called the show a sham. Jensen writes that the HGTV producers found her family’s plan to turn their current home into a rental property “boring and overdone,” and therefore crafted a narrative about their desperation for more square footage. What’s more, producers only agreed to feature Jensen’s family after they had bought their new house, forcing them to “tour” friends’ houses that weren’t even for sale to accommodate the trope of “Which one will they choose?”

Now…my family and I appeared on House Hunters International and…well. Look. I was a theatre major for a few semesters in college. I switched to English because all I really wanted to do was read the plays, not act in them. Still, I persevered. I even tried to force myself into exhibitionism by anonymously posing nude for art classes throughout the Washington, DC suburbs. Standing naked in front of a room full of strangers? That should spark my acting bug.

Not quite.

Standing disrobed while observing a man with an erection sketch my bony shoulders I discovered a few more pressing and fundamental truths about myself. One, I was really quite shockingly thin. And two, I’m a voyeur, a reader, a watcher at heart…I’m not disturbed by being watched, per se. But not as turned on by the scepter of me naked in some Montgomery County arts center as some people. It was an important life lesson, nevertheless, figuring out my rightful instrument.

Akin to my public experimentations with nudity, being on a reality television show taught me several key lessons about acting — and reality in television, too.

1. There is no such thing as an English speaking real estate agent in Seville, Spain.

1. The fact that an unemployed English speaking architect played one on TV is indicative of just how bad el crisis really is.

1. As much as I love the “Real Housewives of Everywhere,” it does not surprise me that so many seasons end in divorce (or suicide).

1. I’ve never forayed into the fake orgasm. Imagine my dismay when forced to fake excitement over the bidet in a sh*t hole I would never in a million years consider living in, let alone pay a real “real” estate agent or fake one to take me to.

1. I made the right decision, choosing English over a career in Soaps.

1. Reality stars are definitely underpaid.

1. Reality stars are under-appreciated for their talents. (I mean, the Gorgas must be, like, “Wire” good.)

1. Reality stars are exploited workers. Our four-day, fourteen hour shoots must have been in violation of something ethical.

1. If you are getting paid to appear on a reality television show, knocking down the proscenium arch is in bad form. (Go ahead, call my foul!)

1. “Before” & “After” is a matter of perspective…and editing.

1. I will never force my kid in front of a camera crew ever again.

1. A “take two!” three or more for cuteness’ sake does not a happy toddler (or mommy) make.

1. Reality stars who parade their children in front of reality television cameras as a rule should probably be investigated by child protective services.

Let me stop right there for a moment. My family and I were paid to appear on the show, as such I am not going to delve into all of the “Matrix”-y specifics. Like, okay, so maybe our Before occurred a full two years after our real after. And our ever After happened two weeks before our Before. But I will share with you this, the most important lesson I learned about armchair entertainment whilst appearing in a reality television show: there is no such thing as reality television.

But still we watch, we read, we judge, we escape. Reality television is voyeurism at its basest, a peek through the neighbor’s curtains. Why are we surprised that with the curtains thrown wide open — even on HGTV — the watched are merely putting on a show?

Don’t throw the baby out with the bad batch of wheat grass. 

Yes, wheatgrass is awesome. It will return your grey hair back to its rightful hue; supercharge your system with vitamins, minerals and enzymes. It’s a bit grassy on the palette, but who cares, given that it’s a solar powered super green food. But if ever there was a better reason to grow your own wheatgrass, this baby head porcelain planter has got to be it.

Handmade by Eco Elements, a division of Revisions Design Studio, it’s like a Chia-Pet-for-wellness/contraceptive-alternative-for-teenagers. That analogy might not make sense now, but have you ever cared for a Chia Pet or one of those mothering dolls that’s meant to ward off pubescent pregnancy? One can only hope the big bald baby and his bag of wheatgrass have a better outcome.

This post originally appeared on EcoSalon, where I was the Shelter Editor. Click here for more…

Milan-based fashion house Marni created quite a scene with its 100 Chairs collection at last month’s Salone del Mobile. Lots of attention was generated in Milan, online and off, because the collection was created in San Gil, Colombia by craftsmen and former inmates as part of a post-prison rehabilitation program. Also because the chairs themselves are gorgeous - a candy colored collection of eighty chairs, ten deckchairs and ten tables in twenty colors, seven models and twenty-one variations. The collection is very much in the Central/South American aesthetic, reminiscent of Marka Moderna’s Stingo Stools.

The collection sold out at the Marni Boutique at Via Della Spiga 50 – with proceeds donated to the institute ICAM of Milan, an organization supporting children of imprisoned mothers.

Also part of the initiative, this strangely relaxing video by photographer and filmmaker Francesco Jodice showing Marni staff sitting and lounging, sometimes nervously twisting their fingers and tapping their toes, in the chairs. The film is part of a project called ‘L’Arte del Ritratto’ – the art of the portrait.

Marni has given us the art of fashion, and now the art of sitting. The art of salvaging. The art of giving back.

This post originally appeared on EcoSalon, where I was the Shelter Editor. Click here for more…

Futuristic, pretty, handmade, techie, and minimalist schools make high school look more fun than it really is.  

Not that anyone in his or her right mind would want to repeat high school. Pretending that you could, however, might the innovative architecture of these structures make it a more compelling proposition? Or is the glossy new coat of contemporary schoolhouse design simply that? A pretty, but impractical cape.

Ecco Eco founder and textile artist Abigail Doan veers towards the latter. She and her husband send their kids to a modest school in Sofia, Bulgaria. “There is no campus per se, but a lovely neighborhood building,” she explains. “What makes [a school] exceptional, frankly, is the spirit of family involvement…not necessarily a feeling of ‘elitism’ based on higher learning housed in state-of-the art buildings or sleek classrooms.”

Like a good book or beautiful person, it’s the inside that counts. In the case of school, the curriculum. Nevertheless, using pure aesthetics as a litmus, here are a dozen schoolhouses that rock.

Vittra School Telefonplan turned to Danish studio Rosan Bosch to create a school without classroom walls. As observed by PSFK, it looks like Google HQ – engaging, creative, ergonomically dashing and kind of enviable. Oh, to be a kid again (who happens to live in Stockholm). It must be noted, however: kids at the real Google school are not nearly as plugged in as the kids in these photos.

The two-story Sydney Centre for Innovation and Learning is full of nooks and crannies with clever names like the Brainforest, the Parklands, the Glasshouse and Greenhouse, the Sandpit (a place for concentration), the Bridge and Deck, and the Loft (for seniors only). There are no formal desks and chairs; the exterior, designed as series of sharp corners and sheltered spaces, give it a boat-like appearance.

The Penleigh and Essendon Junior Boys School in Melbourne is in a residential area dominated by Federation and Italianate mansions. A recent project by McBride Charles Ryan resulted in giving the school this striking façade. A true “building of imagination.”

Copenhagen. Of course. Ørestad College (which is the Danish version of high school) is airy and contemporary with dashes of colorful transparent glass that rotate automatically with the sun. It also features “swirling staircases” and “platforms upon which students lounge on big orange pillows.”

Local craftsmen, pupils and teachers built the Handmade School in therural Bangladeshi village of Rudrapur, alongside other artisans and volunteers.

Located on the largest of the Canary Islands (Tenerife), Rafael Arozarena High School melds in well with its surroundings, meant to represent a mound of volcanic rock. Designed by AMP Arquitectos, it features a concrete exterior treated in a wash of “chameleon-like” tones.

This contemporary structure was designed by Austrian design firm Coop Himmelb(l)au and bears a likeness to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. It houses High School #9 in Central Los Angeles and is a public high school for the visual and performing arts.

Canning Vale High School in Perth, Australia was designed to reflect its teaching philosophy: embracing a more “complex, open and adaptive society common to the 21st century.”

Originally a simple maintenance project, firm Lemieux and Smith Vigeant Architects Collective ended up completely renovating this secondary school in Quebec, Canada. Yes, that is a rock climbing wall at the far end of the basketball court.

Martinkallio School in Helsinki was designed as a compact rectangular structure to minimize its impact on the wooded terrain that surrounds it.

The Facilitair Centrum Niekée in the Netherlands is a colorful bubble-wrapped school replete with open decks for large group teaching and hanging skyboxes for smaller seminars.

The allure of going to school in Switzerland starts with the scenery. Peeking inside of the upper school in Thusis, located on a plateau between the town and a river, Swiss neutrality with a dash of Eastern minimalism makes the grade.

This post originally appeared on EcoSalon, where I was the Shelter Editor. Click here for more…

Images: Rosan Bosch; Web Urbanist; Imagine School Design

Patchwork as complex as Americana. 

A quilt is never just a quilt. It’s like Winona said in How to Make an American Quilt: “Young lovers seek perfection. Old lovers learn the art of sewing shreds together and of seeing beauty in a multiplicity of patches.”

In the mid-1990s, the United States economy was well into an economic expansion, doing so well that the Federal Reserve had to engineer a “soft landing” the previous year to slow it down. Had Noni been quilting in the late 2000s, however, her character might have channeled Kathryn Clark instead of a carefree, forlorn lover.

Modesto Foreclosure Quilt, 2011

“Quilts…are a diary of the hard times people have lived through,” Clark explained via email. “People know that quilts tell a powerful story. When they see that quilts are being made about current issues, they react to it on a more emotional level because it reminds them that these events are historical.”

Her Foreclosure Series is a quilting expression that visually punctuates the gashes left in the wake of our economic turbulence. As a former urban planner, Clark is keenly aware of the impact the foreclosure crisis has had on the fabric of communities. The crisis, when delineated in a quilt, shows a changeable yet recurring pattern affecting neighborhoods from sea to shining sea, and the rolling fields of grain in between.

Albuquerque Foreclosure Quilt, 2011

Cape Coral Foreclosure Quilt, 2011

All visually stunning, yes. But sadly, hers are quilts that bear little comfort.

Clark mapped out her quilts using RealtyTrac, denoting foreclosed lots as holes in the patchwork.

Conversely, her Inhabit Project, created in collaboration with Vanessa Filley of Moira & Obbie, explores what it means to literally “inhabit” a space, to live in it and among it. Her studio served as muse; leftover remnants sewn into used napkins, her materials. The collaboration itself, she explains, is elemental to the discipline.

“I think people are realizing that recent generations have followed paths that have taken us away from our community and are harming our planet in the process. Quilting is just one way to slow down and reconnect with what’s in front of you, without producing waste.”

Bookshelf, 2011

Floor, 2011

To borrow from Clark’s Idiom Series, which “renders literally the idioms of everyday language” out of hand felted wool, steel wire, embroidery thread and twine on sewn linen and silk, what goes around comes around.

What Comes Around, Goes Around, 2010

…including economic prosperity. During the next boom, let’s hope, homes will be treated as places to inhabit instead of commodities to trade, gamble and lose.

This post originally appeared on EcoSalon, where I was the Shelter Editor. Click here for more…

Via Trendland and Kathryn Clark