Globalization and the Fast Fashion Industry

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion - By Elizabeth L. Cline

ISBN 9781591846543

Publication Date: 2013-7-28

In Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline questions our insatiable urge of acquiring clothing from the perspective of an average American consumer. In a digestible format, Cline introduces a general landscape of fast fashion overconsumption and ponders societal attitudes over how we value and own clothing. This reading connects our everyday consumer behavior to the fast fashion waste addressed in Soledad Salamé’s works.  

The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good - By Elizabeth L. Cline

ISBN 9781524744304

Publication Date: 2019-08-20

The Conscious Closet is a self-help guide to building a more sustainable wardrobe and breaking away from fast fashion. With consideration for materials, origins, and building a personal connection to clothing pieces, Cline proposes a long-term vision in owning items of quality, longevity, and style. Aligned with the topic of fast fashion consumption in Soledad Salamé: Camouflage, this book calls for a personal reflection on our everyday impulses and offers achievable actions to reduce our environmental footprint, starting with our closet.

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade - By Pietra Rivoli

ISBN 9780470287163

Publication Date: 2009-03-03

Following the lifecycle of a t-shirt across three continents from an economics perspective, Rivoli brings to light the people, politics and markets involved in globalized clothing industries. Her research reveals the political, economic, business, and moral forces behind the circulation of garments. This book tackles the global economy beginning with the cotton trade, manufacturing and exporting industries, and continuing with secondhand clothing and their sub-industries. This reading is relevant in considering the global economic backdrop to the issue of fast fashion waste, the topic of Salamé’s exhibition.

Textile Waste in the Atacama Desert

“Fashion’s Desert Graveyard.” National Geographic - By John Barlett  

SKU NGM202404

Publication Date: 2024-4-1

In this National Geographic story, Barlett investigates the secondhand clothing importing trade in Chile, coined as “great fashion garbage patch.” Left undesired after sorting for resale and recycling, discarded garments are eventually dumped in the landfill of the Atacama Desert. This journalistic story lends an insight into textile waste in the Atacama Desert, as addressed in the exhibition. 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/chile-fashion-pollution

“Atacama Desert’s Solastalgia: Color and Water for Dumping.” Biosemiotics - By Catalina Sánchez De Jaegher 

Publication Date: 2024-1-11

“Atacama Desert’s Solastalgia: Color and Water for Dumping” is a journal article on the biocultural distress caused by fashion and technological waste dumping, from a biosemiotics lens. The changing landscape, with mountains of waste and polluted water, disrupts and destroys biocultural semiotics of the Atacama Desert by disconnecting meanings and ecological relationships of the land. This article provides a nonhuman-centric analysis of cultural and ethical impacts of environmental exploitation in the Atacama Desert. Consider this article in mourning for the unquantifiable loss related to themes in the exhibition.  

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-023-09551-w

“Mapping Fast Fashion Landfills: Remote Sensing and GIS Approach to Analyze Textile Waste.” International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences - By Elia Stoyanova and Viktor Vitoy 

Publication Date: 2025-8-1

“Mapping Fast Fashion Landfills: Remote Sensing and GIS Approach to Analyze Textile Waste” is a peer-reviewed paper on the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing in examining the rapid growth of textile waste accumulation in the Atacama Desert. Using open-sourced imaging data from Sentinel-2, accessible through the European Space Agency (ESA), Stoyanova and Vitvoy determine the materials of landfill based on spectral analysis and identify changes to the landfill area. Their interpretation of the trend of fast fashion over an eight-year period points to the urgency of its impact on the environment. Also consider aerial images and scientific maps from this research in Soledad Salamé’s imagery.  

https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLVIII-G-2025-1389-2025

Art and Cartography  

Time for Mapping: Cartographic Temporalities - Edited by Sybille Lammes; C. R. Perkins; Alex Gekker; Sam Hind; Clancy Wilmott; Daniel Evans 

ISBN 9781526122537

Publication Date: 2018-06-07

Time for Mapping: Cartographic Temporalities provides an array of contemporary digital mapping strategies, spatial and temporal. With an emphasis on temporality, digital mapping serves as the ground for reconstruction, speculations, and mediations of movement-space. In thinking about mapping information and time in Soledad Salamé’s works, consider the various approaches in space-and-time data representation, particularly in “Part II: Stitching Memories” (113-72). 

After Nature - by Justin Brice Guariglia; Eva Horn [contributor] 

Publication Date: 2017

After Nature is a catalog by Justin Brice Guariglia for his exhibition of the same name at TWOTHIRTYONE Projects. Guariglia’s aerial landscapes document destruction of glaciers caused by human activities in the Anthropocene. In collaboration with scientific research, his work features photographs with integration of other methods such as printmaking and painting. The way he represents visual data topographically in large-scale to evoke corporeal experiences offers another artistic perspective not so dissimilar from Soledad Salamé’s.  

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - by Jock Reynolds; Philip Brookman [contributor]; Terry Tempest Williams [contributor] 

Publication Date: 2002-06-01

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth is a photo book of Gowin’s aerial photography since 1986. This collection of photographs shows traces of human activities’ effects on these breathtaking landscapes across five continents. This book is in conversation with specific artworks in the exhibition Soledad Salamé: Camouflage.  

Salamé directly draws imageries for her Territories Series: Salt Lake, Utah (2013) from page 12; Territories Series: Ramot, Jerusalem (2013) from page 39; Territories Series: Craters, Nevada (2013) from page 95; and Territories Series: Czech Republic (2013) from page 69. 

Handmade

The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design - Edited by Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch 

ISBN 9781784538248

Publication Date: 2020-12-24

The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design is an edited volume of contemplations on how contemporary craft functions in the political and social spheres. This reading is chosen for Julia Bryan-Wilson's writing on the sculptor Shinique Smith in chapter 13, “Shinique Smith: Lines That Bind” (199-205). Like Soledad Salamé, Smith is also interested in recycling found garments as an art material, addressing the economics of materials between the maker and the system.  

Fast Fashion/Slow Art - Edited by Bibiana Obler and Phyllis Rosenzweig 

ISBN 9781785512230

Publication Date: 2019-08-16

Fast Fashion/Slow Art is an exhibition catalog by curators Bibiana Obler and Phyllis Rosenzweig, presented at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, and organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine in cooperation with the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, and the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum. This book falls under the Handmade category for its collection of artistic and creative responses to the industrial fastness in global production and distribution of textiles. Films and art projects featured in this catalog offer a range of voices in revealing and resisting forces of global textile industries, echoing the sentiment to slow down in Salamé’s exhibition.  

Below is a link to the online version of the exhibition:

https://www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum/exhibitions/digital/fast-fashion-slow-art/index.html

Social Paper: Hand Papermaking in the Context of Socially Engaged Art - Edited by Jessica Cochran and Melissa Potter 

ISBN 9780929911557

Publication Date: 2019-08-16

Social Paper provides a context to radical social histories of hand papermaking since the late nineteenth century. The various projects in this book invite the reader to consider the artistic process of papermaking as one that is politically and socially meaningful. Turning towards Salamé’s use of recycled fibers in her paper pulps, this book suggests connections between her process, recycled fibers and construction of dresses, and her subject, fast fashion wastes.  

Eco Art

To Life!: Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet - By Linda Weintraub 

ISBN 9780520273627

Publication Date: 2012-09-01

With examples of eco art pioneers and explorers, To Life!: Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet is a textbook providing structures to eco art genres and strategies. This book presents perspectives into contemporary artists’ interests over ecological footprints and materials in their practices, highlighting our inherent participation in our ecologies. Weintraub’s schematics offer an analytical framework to read Soledad Salamé’s works, regarding waste, systems and materialism, under the lens of eco art.  

Some artists featured in this book had past exhibitions at the Blaffer Art Museum. More information on them is included under Further Interests. 

What's Next? Eco Materialism & Contemporary Art - By Linda Weintraub 

ISBN 9781783209408

Publication Date: 2019-02-15

A hybridization of a textbook and a workbook, What’s Next? Eco Materialism & Contemporary Art allows the reader entry into what could be constituted as materials in eco art. With forty artists' examples each demonstrating their unique eco art material and approach, Weintraub prompts the reader to experiment with their own artistic voice. This book is connected to the other reading on the Annotated Bibliography, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet also by Weintraub, and it invites the reader’s ideation of eco art process with consideration of Salamé’s use of recycled materials addressing environmentalism in the exhibition.  

Further Interests

Mel Chin: Rematch (2015) 

Mel Chin is featured in To:Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (2012) by Linda Weintraub (see Eco Art). The exhibition archive and resource guide correspond to his exhibition Mel Chin: Rematch (2015) at the Blaffer Art Museum.  

Blaffer Art Museum Exhibition Archive 

https://blafferartmuseum.org/mel-chin-rematch/ 

Guide to Exhibits 

https://guides.lib.uh.edu/BlafferReadingNook/MelChinRematch 

Ripped and Torn: Levi's, Latin America and the Blue Jean Dream - By Amaranta Wright 

ISBN 9780091900830

Publication Date: 2019-02-15

Ripped and Torn: Levi's, Latin America and the Blue Jean Dream is an anecdotal account of Wright’s journalistic travel to selected cities in Latin America as commissioned by the denim enterprise Levi’s. Through her own touristic lens with sentimental associations to Argentina, Wright points out her compromised position as a foreigner representing a corporation in its attempt to secure their financial stronghold through brand marketing. A counterpart to The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy (2009) by Pietra Rivoli (see Globalization and the Fast Fashion Industry), this personal narrative serves as an entry-point to the established systems of clothing trades from a business perspective, and its impact on economics and cultures considered as developing countries by the West.