Today we are introducing Sweatshop (After Jonah Peretti).
COLL.EO, Sweatshop (After Jonah Peretti), 2014
For this performance, COLL.EO replayed Jonah Peretti’s seminal performance Sweatshop. In 2001, the Artist attempted to purchase a pair of customized sneakers from the Nike iD shop, an online footwear shop launched in 1999 by Nike Corporation that allowed consumers to customize their footwear in details. Peretti chose to have the word “Sweatshop” embroidered on his shoes, as he “wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made [his] shoes” (Peretti, 2001).
In the Summer of 2014, COLL.EO successfully purchased a pair of customized shoes from adidas with the text “SWEATSHOP” embroidered on them, via “mi adidas”, the company’s online sneaker customization tool. Mi adidas “offers a wide selections of colors” that let the customer “mix and match for a shoe that lives up to [their] look”. We chose white and red, the colors of the Indonesian flag, a country that produces adidas shoes.