African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI)
We are a curious and audacious collective looking at the remakes and remnants of the colonial violence of fashion. Convened by the African Fashion Research Institute and based in South Africa, the collective developed organically from the provocative online African Fashion (?) course. The multi-disciplinary cohort expands on thinking and making possibilities, enquiring whether/where the generative can intervene, interrupt, and re-fashion fragments. The collective coheres at the intersections and overlaps of the work of fashion curator and academic Dr Erica de Greef, cultural thinker and project innovator dr heeten bhagat, fashion practitioner and performance artist Lesiba Mabitsela, designer and critical fashion researcher Siviwe James, and, cultural activist and curator Russel Hlongwane. Collectively the members have published, created, exhibited, studied, disrupted, produced, collaborated, filmed, debated, facilitated, and more, across the arts fields, but with a strong focus on the politics and poetics of fashion in Africa.