This Is Not a Shirt. This Is a Playground

Created for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, This Is Not a Shirt. This Is a Playground explores the relationship between architecture, labour, local production and social life. The installation draws on the rural village of Rudrapur in Bangladesh, where housing, food production, craft and everyday life remain closely connected, and contrasts this with the spatial pressures generated by migration toward centralised textile-production centres.

Rather than treating textile production as an isolated economic activity, Anna Heringer proposes decentralised village-based production as a way of sustaining livelihoods and a more humane spatial environment. Recycled sari textiles produced through Didi Textiles hang from bamboo poles within a 42 m² installation, turning material, craft and architecture into an argument for local agency, dignity and the Biennale theme of Freespace. My photographs documented the installation during the Biennale opening.