Open Sesame installation pairs Syrian refugee-made soap with Alibaba.com leather bags
Designer Charlotte Maëva Perret has built a towering installation of soaps made by Syrian refugees and Albibaba.com luxury leather bags to help people visualise the connection between offline production and global online retail.
Called Open Sesame: Exercises in entrepreneurship, Perret's installation is on show for the Istanbul Design Biennial. Its aim is to highlight the fact that global online retail platforms have huge impacts on the places that manufacture their goods.
It does this by bringing together the Syrian folk tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and the Chinese online retail giant Alibaba.com.
"The installation hopes to remind the visitor of the offline bodies and invisible geographies that participate in late capitalism choreographies," the French designer and visual artist told Dezeen.
The centrepiece in the exhibition is a column of soaps that were made in a factory in southern Turkey, arranged as they are stacked to dry.
On additional stacks of soaps that surround the column, Perret has placed a range of counterfeit leather bags printed with online retailer Albibaba.com's branding, which she designed and manufactured in Turkey.
Perret describes the soaps and bags as "made for survival", as they are examples of the items made by smart business people who have been forced to leave their home country.
"My research is concerned with rapid large scale transformations of the last few decades such as the decline of mass prod...
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