Dress Rehearsals for the Apocalypse
Missives from the bottom of the world
Dear reader,
A slight deviation from regular (if once every six months or so could be considered regular) programming. No personal trauma essay today.
Most of you probably know I’m in an art collective called Fast Fashun. We have just launched our latest zine, and I wanted to give you all a sneak peek. Also, one of my teachers told me to stop putting my essays up for free (apparently studying Professional Writing and Editing means at some point you should be aiming to be professional). Never fear I’m not starting a subscription service. No, instead I took down my last essay, rewrote the ending, and am pitching it to publications, and right now I’m about to pitch you our Fast Fashun zine.
Excerpt from the zine:
Missives from the bottom of the worldFast Fashun is a collective of queer DIY freaks based in Naarm (so-called Melbourne, Australia). There are four of us: Luna Aquatica, Famous Artist Sebastian Berto, Sarah Seahorse, and me – Teneille Clerke aka Tenfingerz. We have backgrounds in design, fashion, visual art, costume, theatre, social work, activism, art therapy, and hospitality. We've been collaborating for over a decade using fashion as a tool for social change.
At the core of our practice is collaboration. We pool our diverse skill set to create community events that are inclusive, accessible and silly.
We host DIY runway shows using clothing waste we source from recycling centres. Participants are invited to create a new outfit from the waste to wear on a catwalk that happens every hour on the hour. Outfits are made quickly, often using just safety pins.
Fast Fashun is a creative response to the climate emergency. We aim to educate the public on the social and environmental perils of the fashion industry. We bring people together to open up discussions about climate distress and offer a space to express your frustrations. All abilities and levels of skill are able to participate in Fast Fashun. Everyone gets to have their moment and be celebrated on the catwalk.
This publication is an extension of the Fast Fashun project; a fashion and lifestyle zine about prepping for the apocalypse.
Here at the bottom of the world – under the hole in the ozone layer with our Black Summers; increasingly regular 'once in a hundred-year’ floods; asthma thunderstorms; tick migrations; flesh-eating backyard bacterias; coral bleaching; seismic blasting; draconian law enforcement; and rising neo-nazi enthusiasm (to name a few) – it's not enough to just sit around throwing fashion events about the end of the world. We've compiled a collection of missives from radical thinkers and doers about what they believe you need to know to prepare for the end times.
First aid kits, emergency kits, mutual aid, blowing up pipelines – the Fast Fashun zine suggests it all (plus encourages you to remain fashionable while doing it).
This is it comrades, it's time to prepare. This is our dress rehearsal for the apocalypse.
Step 1. Dress yourself
Step 2. Memorise the contents of this zine
Step 3. Use this zine to start a small fire.
That was a lil intro I wrote for the zine. I also wrote a profile on queer prepper/mega-babe Caitlin Molloy called: How to be a queer who moves to the country.
Before she moved to Bega, Caitlin spent plenty of time talking about moving to the country. “Friends would be like, I found these amazing places like 100 acres of dense bush surrounded by unmanaged state forests. And there's like one dirt road in and out, and there's no one else nearby. And I was like, this is fucked, and you're gonna die in a fire. I want really boring things like to be near the hospital.”
Writer and anti-fascist activist Tom Tanuki – who I got to know via Instagram during lockdowns thanks to our shared interest in cookers – wrote an article on protest culture titled: Find people who can tell you to pull ya fkn head in at the end of the world.
Apocalypses are presented in final end-times terms. Movies send us the message that we’re set for a Mad Max vista of burning buildings, tundras and V8 Interceptors. But people actually survive apocalypses. If an ‘apocalypse’ is a cataclysmic wave of violence and radical change sweeping across all of your old lives and land and culture, then remember that Indigenous people of this continent have, to quote writer Mykaela Saunders:
‘…already survived one genocidal apocalypse – yet [they] continue to live well, in [their] culture, under oppressive policies, through ongoing ecocide, within a destructive and unsustainable economic system’.
I consider this proof that survival through apocalypse can be done. So we can learn, and imagine, and protest, and not be insufferably online in the way we do it.
Another internet acquaintance of mine, Feral Meryl aka @merrels2.cumdumpofsecrets aka Naarm’s darling of the meme scene – even though he no longer makes any memes. We have never met irl but early in our online dialogue, he sent me a voice memo of himself playing piano and singing Maybe This Time from Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. I genuinely cried. It was parasocial love at first voice memo. I’ve been obsessed with his hyperlocal, hyper-specific, hyper-unhinged commentary ever since. For the Fast Fashun zine, Feral Meryl has offered us a Climate Catastrophe Column.
As the earth gets hotter, mosquito numbers are poised to explode, and accordingly, so too will disease. I also read recently that ice caps thawing is set to reveal time-locked carcasses of animals with strange plagues no one has heard about for centuries. When that happens – and I loathe to say it – it’s gonna be lockdown forever bitch (cue return of my prolific meme output).
I think the answer here is just to stock up on Mortein and pretend you’re that dickhead at Mercat who used to put amyl in the smoke machine. The mozzies will die in a horny fit of bloodlust.
Jen Rae from the Centre for Reworlding can be credited with shifting my mindset from climate action to preparedness. They have written an article about a project they created in collaboration with Emma Byrnes on emergency kits. You can access the emergency kit info resource here.
Other contributors include Alex Kelly discussing mutual aid; Taj Scicluna aka The Perma Pixie with advice on what to include in a herbal first aid kit; Geoff Berry gives some pretty devastating insights into our climate trajectory and then offers some ways to connect with nature and ourselves through mindfulness and meditation; and, Sofia Sabbagh and Mary Leunig have both created some very cute/depressing illustrations.
The zine also includes fashion editorials by Sarah Seahorse and Luna Aquatica with photography by Lexi Laphor.
And finally a Fast Fashun Survival Guide and fashion editorial by Tobias Manderson-Galvin.
It’s important to have the right suit for the right occasion.
The Big Interview. Secret Security Detail. The Life of a 1880s-1920s Romantic Tramp. The Wedding/Second Wedding/Hawaiian Shirt is Fine Third Wedding. Domestic Air Travel in the 1960s. Naked, Screaming, and Drenched in Blood (Birthday Suit). Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles (Tarot Suits).
Death Row Inmates in six of the twenty-seven states of the USA that have death penalties get to choose the Suit They Wear to Their Last Meal. Liberace chose the Suit He Was Buried In (gold sequin, single fronted, three button, silver cuff, and collar trim, w. three-quarter opera cape). In 2007 French, German, and US human rights groups accused former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of the Crime of Torture (during the ‘War on Terror’) by applying to the Hague to file a Law Suit. What suit is right for you?
If you’d like to purchase a zine you can do so via our website fastfashun.com
It’s A4, 80 pages in total, full colour, 150gsm, and printed on recycled paper. It is a piece of art for you to keep and cherish and pour over through the end times.
Pick-up will be available when our pop-up shop, Decay-Mart, opens in North Melbourne at the end of October. Unless you personally know me, Sarah, or Sebastian, in which case you may organise a pick up from one of our houses or in a dark alley of your choosing. International shipping is a bit spenno and we are sorry about that. But this zine is coming from the literal bottom of the world and our dollar sucks so hopefully it doesn’t seem too bad after conversion.
Love Teneille x