Please Save Our Earth!: Runway Presentation

Presented as the Closing Event for Please Save Our Earth! How to Wear Out Climate Change
Featuring Designs By Suldano Abdiruhman, Eppchez!, Aimee Lin, and Lane Speidel
Sounds By bb Basura
Organized By Sarah Kim
Originally Held on Sunday, May 23, 2021

As a culminating event for the exhibition Please Save Our Earth!, artists/designers Suldano Abdiruhman, Eppchez!, Aimee Lin, and Lane Speidel showcased their work as part of a closing runway presentation organized by 2020 Curatorial Fellow Sarah Kim.

Clothes are by nature symbiotic with the body and manifestations of an individual’s worldview. With these capsule presentations the artists hope to both give full life and expression to these tender threads and to offer you visions of different earths we can exist in.

The program featured sounds by bb Basura, with a small reception that followed, and was supported in part by the Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant.

About the Artists

Suldano Abdiruhman is an interdisciplinary artist, maker and organizer raised in Baltimore, MD and based in West Philadelphia. Formally trained in fiber and graphic design, her work is primarily concerned with the cross-cultural use of textiles as a form of communication, meditation, protection, and marker of time. Her work has been shown at Spillway Collective, the Walters Museum of Art, Platform Gallery, the Peale Museum, Oak Hill Center for Education and Culture, the Penthouse Gallery, and in various online exhibitions. She is a member of the artist collective BALTI GURLS, a Black feminist collective aimed at creating platforms and spaces for women of color in the artist and music industries, and the co-founder of holsol studio. She is also an avid listener, intermittent gardener, and experimental home cook.
More Info: suldanoa.com / @suldanoa / @ziplockshorty

Eppchez! is a Quaker, Cuban & Jewish performer and innovator committed to stewardship and equity through human-centered artistic and economic practices. In 2017 Eppchez began designing non-phallic packers to further conversations around gender expansive self-determination. Ey calls this trans-empowerment project Darb Garb. Ey received support from The Leeway Foundation and NextFAB to learn more about the sartorial design needs of trans people and develop materials and strategy for solving them. Eppchez has always preferred to get clothes second hand and alter or mend them. In designing new garments ey is committed to using materials that have a low environmental impact or would otherwise end up in a landfill.
More Info: almasengine.com / darbgarb.com / @eppchez / @darb.garb

Aimee Lin is an artist, educator, and explorer living on occupied Lenape Land, in West Philadelphia. Their Sagittarian desire for constant exploration fuels their current research in dreamwork, nomadic architecture, performative garments, semiotics, and a plethora of esoteric resources. They are meticulously cataloging a Cosmic Library, a composition of peripheral sounds, intuitive objects, and communal actions, all woven together. Collecting, building, weaving, and listening, they relish in the nuances of tangles, deliberate and chance. Research began in their childhood: moments of leisure were spent collecting rocks, exploring the nonlinear, and recreating dreams. Now, they investigate collective histories, alternative paradigms, pedagogical exchanges, and in search of resonance.
More Info: aimeeaimeeaimee.com / @aimeeaimeeaimee

Lane Speidel is a white, trans, non-binary, queer artist with invisible disabilities. They are an artist member of Vox Populi, a graduate of Tyler School of Art, and a preschool teacher. Their work consists of sculpture, writing, movement, music, and fiber-work. They are interested in surviving to communally created imagined queer futures in which we are all free.
More Info: ihopeilikethis.com / @body_joke

bb Basura works both as a DJ and in sound design for theater and film. She has performed and played at venues such as MoMA PS1, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Berlin Community Radio, the secret rave by the river, and cross country queer celebrations and festivals such as Pansyfest and Idapalooza. Her creative work is characterized by a centering and embracing of queer and global south club music, dance, and thunderous sound. Her performances exist as a carrier of stories and memories, and as a practice of imagining and creating more hopeful and alternative possibilities and environments for queer and trans joy and healing.
More Info: soundcloud.com/bbbasura