The Khadi Project
Travellers in different worlds
We wanted to do something new, to travel with more of a purpose.
When we arrived in India, the country inspired us to combine our passions of travel and design. We met Alvaro, a fellow traveller who completed our team with audio-visual skills to share our message.
Dazzled by all the art and culture of India, wandering through the markets we began to ask where all the things came from that we were buying. Its often difficult to get a response to these kind of questions in most countries, and the answers are often very sad to comprehend. Upon further investigation we found that the peope working in most clothing factories are paid between $1 and $5 US a day, working a minimum of 12 hours a day in bad conditions.
The tragic truth we realized is that the majority of the modern world holds more value over money than human life.
MADE IN INDIA, MADE IN THAILAND, MADE IN BANGLADESH…
We began to seek and explore the concept of Fair Trade, a social movement that helps producers in developing countries, promoting greater equity and human rights in international trading partnerships.
In our search we made contact with Ashok, a man leading a group of artisans working under the fair trade concept. Ashok is a fighter for human rights and a follower of Ghandi. He defies the rules of India´s society by giving work people of lower caste such as the people of the Thar desert and Pakistani refugee women who do not have many options to make a living.
These artisans live in a village called Raisar in the Thar desert where they weave fabrics by hand with an ancestral technique called Khadi. The whole family participates in the process and it is their only livelihood.
There are also Pakistani refugee women living in a conflict zone on the border of
India and Pakistan. They make embroidery with cotton threads in designs of their tribe. Due to the industrialization, these artisans are running out of options and being forced to work in factories of slave-like conditions.
We as designers want to combine art with ethics, to create change and awareness among the people who buy these products.
Why in India, not in South America? At this point in our travels we were traveling in India, and all the factors were given to the project here. India is one of the largest regions in the world with factories lacking fair or ethical trade.
PROJECT BENEFITS
– To create and spread awarness about ethical shoping.
– More work and better opportunities for the artisans and embroiderers, with increased motivation to preserve their textile arts.
– Construction of a workplace for the group of artisans and dissemination of their products.
– To promote and share these traditional techniques of India and Pakistan.
– Create designs that can be marketed in Fair Trade shops (fair trade) as Oxfam and Ten Thousand Villages.
Where does the funding go?
– To the artisans for their work, making the collection of small pillow/cushion covers made from Khadi combined with hand embroidery.
– Marketing, including photographs and postcards of the artisans and their families.
– Event inauguration in Santiago de Chile with a showroom displaying the artisan´s collection and a photographic exhibition of the project.
– To build the Ashram, to generate more jobs and dissemination.