Film by Meghna Gupta

Where do your clothes go, once you’ve given them to a charity? Everything Must Go is an exhibition that seeks to make visible and tangible some of the flows of textile waste. The screening of Meghna Gupta’s debut film Unravel in the exhibition shows the journey of clothing waste from the UK to Panipat in North India. Here we meet some women in a textile recycling factory who work to dismantle the garments and shred them so that they can become recycled yarn. What is truly touching in the film are some of the testimonies that Reshma and her co-worker’s share in their encounter with certain western garments like, a swimming suit or embroidered underwear. With limited exposure to western culture, the garments fuel their imagination and preconceptions of western lifestyle, bringing both a sobering and humorous rendition of what ‘our’ clothes might say about our western lives from afar. The exhibition and film definitely provided some food for thought into consumption patterns in clothing.