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[instrumental music]
This particular bag is a Fendi logo bag,
and this is a brown Chanel quilted purse.
A Burberry scarf,
Marc Jacobs,
Dolce and Gabbana,
Louis Vuitton,
Dior,
Yves Saint Lauren,
Mombasa bag,
Stephanie Syjuco is a conceptual artist whose latest undertaking
is what she calls the counterfeit crochet project.
Knock-offs of handbags in the humble medium of crochet.
This, I think is beautiful and ugly at the same time.
It's a Louis Vuitton Marakami handbag in a crochet version
It's trying to approximate everything from like a gold clasp to
you know, the colorful logo, the embroidered details
but in the end, when you look at the original picture and
you look at the copy or the counterfeit
there's definitely a mis-translation going on
which I think is quite beautiful.
when I started getting interested in the concept
of black markets or counterfeit,
it really came from a place of being really interested in consumerism.
Fascinated by bootlegged goods, Stephanie makes
her own low tech replicas of the high end products.
Out of pictures, cardboard and glue.
You know, we're just surrounded by products constantly
and we're surrounded by choices,
we seem so far removed from the idea of making anything
Everything gets made in places very far from us by anonymous people.
With a counterfeit crochet project, Stephanie
has offered people the chance to reclaim the production process
by making their own unique versions of luxury goods.
The project began 2 years ago with a website
Stephanie created to make contact with the crafting community.
I mean, I kinda started the project on a lark.
Like, it was really just a funny idea.
I had no idea how many people would be interested in it.
People just started emailing each other and joining up
and now the project has involved makers from all over the world.
you know, if you kinda wanna look at it
it's outsourcing labor, that's what is happening
but I prefer to look at it as a collaboration
I'm kind of organizing people to participate in this group project.
In Stephanie's production model, the workers actually get to keep the fruits of their labor.
I'd made a point that none of the bags are for sale,
all the bags are the property of the makers and what they're doing
is just loaning them to me for the duration of the exhibition.
The counterfeit crochet project will have it's first showing in the US
at an upcoming exhibition of women artists who make socially conscious work.
It's taking place at the Yerba Buena center for the arts.
I'm interested in socially relevant art work
but I'm not interested in kind of didactic form of you know,
this is good, this is bad kind of message
Labor issues and outsourcing and globalization,
it's a big subject matter and I'm hoping to do it
in a way that's unexpected.
I was encouraging folks to kind of take their own fashion shoots,
with them modelling the bags but also wear
dark sunglasses or kind of block out their faces in a way.
To me, the funny part was to kind of
create the censorship of them doing something bad.
Because as bootleggers they're doing something that's not quite sanctioned.
So if you know how to crochet already,
get started on what I'm making right now,
it's a Gucci wristband.
During the 2 months that the show will run,
Stephanie will be leading workshops in the gallery and
teaching people how to crochet.
[round over, and pull through to]
In a way, the show has kind of become a cover,
like a smoke screen for this larger conversation I wanna have with people.
about just do it yourself aesthetics and improper ways of interfacing with capitalism.
You have this really large, you know, corporate brands
that are pushing this idea of exclusivity.
crochet is associated with being such a lowly medium.
Things that grandmothers you know, make afghans out of.
and I just like that kind of, combination of high and low.
Each counterfeit bag that's made, ironically references a mass produced designer good
but it's inherently a unique object.
I would not wanna own a designer handbag.
I actually really like the fakes much better.
There's something about the copy that's gone through
all the wrong channels.
They're so much more unique I think and special than that sanctioned object.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community