<font size="2">Blank Noise: The Clothes Campaign Against Sexual Harassment</font>
For some months now the Bangalore-based Blank Noise project team has been working on the clothes campaign. They are attempting to collect a minimum of 1,000 clothes that women were wearing when they were sexually harassed and string these together in an installation at a public site and will eventually take it across to many cities. The variety of the clothes coming in (salwar kameezes to tank tops) defies the notion that by wearing a particular kind of clothing, a woman "asks for it". Sexual harassment is a universal phenomenon. Whenever an incident of 'eve teasing' or sexual harassment takes place, the first thing most women themselves and the listeners to the incident ask is “What was she wearing?'” or “Did she 'provoke him'?”
Blank Noise believes that women have a right to feel good about themselves, and wear what they please, without being sexually violated. The campaign questions, defies, and attempts to put an end to the argument that women "ask for it". To establish "asking for it" as a mere excuse for sexual harassment, the project team is asking all women to send in one garment that they wore when they were "eve teased".
Each contributed garment comes from someone's incident as a testimony, or a witness and forms part of a larger collection. The sender could also choose to send text, describing herself, or the incident along with the garment.
Other than clothes being collected in the Blank Noise cities, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad there are people from other cities volunteering to spread the word, collect garments and have them delivered. To volunteer as your city clothes collector, email [email protected]
Amongst the clothes collection is Asiya's salwar kameez from Baramulla, Kashmir and Suren, a design student brought back 24 clothes from Chennai! There is also Rani Kamal collecting clothes in the Andamans, Jimmy in Jaipur, Runa B in Pune and Christina in Singapore! Which goes to show that the count is finally increasing the way it should - each collector is acting as an agent! The clothing count is up on the blog and the team is stepping up efforts to get in as many clothes as possible. A formal public campaign asking for clothes will be in place soon, but till then each of you needs to just bring in as much as you can... even just four clothes for the campaign to hit that magic number of 1000!
So, yes, Blank Noise Project needs you!
To directly mail the clothes:
"Did You Ask For It?"
C/o Blank Noise Studio
Ullas Apartments
No. 402, 8th Main,
12th Cross, Malleswaram
Bangalore 560 004
India
Tel: +91-98868 40612