Dressing Resistance
Film, 2025
Dressing Resistance offers a compelling insight into the political and colonial biography of clothing. The film brings together artistic and academic voices from a conference at Global Heritage Lab/University Bonn entitled “Interwoven Dependency: Redressing Fashion and the Heritage of Mission”, to explore the layered relationship between fashion and mission. It frames dressing as a dynamic site of negotiation, where identities are inscribed, contested, and reimagined.
The film focuses especially on how people in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean creatively reinterpreted European fashion. Many of these clothing styles were originally introduced by missionaries to visibly mark the success of Christian conversion. But what impact did these new dress codes have on traditional clothing – such as in Namibia? How did enslaved women in Jamaica and Brazil adopt and transform European fashion? And how did Afro-Brazilian women use jewellery not only to express their faith, but also as a means of freeing themselves or others from enslavement?
Featuring contributions by Tuli Mekondjo (artist, Namibia), Steeve Buckridge (historian, Jamaica/USA), Julia Binter (Critical museum and heritage studies, Germany), Loo Nascimento (jewellery designer, Brazil), and Dandara Maia (African studies, Brazil/Germany).
Dressing resistance // Exhibition Poster