Inherited Threads

Oak View, California

Behind a chicken wire fence and dusty gravel walkway lies Minga Opazo's studio, a farmhouse-esque shed that she rents out with a friend. Outside, an abandoned antique sink leans against the side of the workshop. Inside, a warm breeze creeps through the open front door.

Woven, butter-colored tapestries hang from the walls, and heaps of clothes rest on a chair next to a wooden work desk, where hemispheres made out of concentric pieces of fabric sit, grouped by color. The orbs' innards remind me of cut cabbage.

The studio door is creaky. Opazo is cutting apart a tank top into snippets of hot pink fabric. She alternates between standing up and sitting down. She cuts out the tag and puts it in a jar on the desk. She wears dark overalls. Sparkly pink socks peek out from the tops of bruised brown boots. She's giggly and apple-cheeked, with honey-blonde hair twisted in a loose braid flipped onto her shoulder.

Opazo asks if I want to see the project and I nod. She puts down the mangled tank top and heads to the back of the studio. I follow.

She unzips the front of the tent, and I duck my head under. It's humid in the tent, especially with the two of us inside. Scraps of yellow yarn and fabric poke out between layers of dried grain and a blanket of winding milky film.

At first, it's jarring—maybe a bit apocalyptic—but that's only because you can't really tell what it is.

The conditions seem right—a ribbed, dusky brown trio of mushrooms flowered recently, caps and all, and another group of twisted, shorter stems followed suit.

To make this sculpture, Opazo weaves recycled textiles on one of the looms in her studio. After creating a textile form, she'll introduce fungi to the sculpture. In a few weeks, clusters of mushrooms will fruit, fueled by the bits of old clothing that fungus can digest.

This is "Rewoven"–a sci-art experimental sculpture that has quickly turned into a visionary textile waste management project dubbed “Re-Dress.”

"It's an organism that can eat a t-shirt and make it disappear. It could be the way to get clothing to break down in nature."

Dominga Opazo spent her childhood in the countryside of Santiago, Chile, surrounded by greenery and sandy roads under the distant peaks of the Andes.

In the summertime, Opazo fondly remembers days spent exploring, swimming and collecting rocks and sticks with her cousins. She considers her childhood relationship with the natural world her greatest artistic inspiration.

"What I most loved as a kid was spending time outdoors…and I loved doing art. I was always doing…art projects. I'd paint my cat's paws and make it walk everywhere."

Chile has a beautiful textile history dating back to the Mapuche, the indigenous peoples of Chile. Andean societies considered textiles to be of great importance in trade and tradition.

In Opazo's family, she is a fourth-generation textile crafter. Many of the women in her family are fashion-oriented. Her grandmother is a seamstress, and her mother is a set and costume designer.

During the school year, Opazo went from class to her mother's boutique, where her grandmother, aunt, and mother made clothing. Opazo remembers spending those afternoons playing with stitching needles and watching her grandmother bend over her sewing machine.

"It's just part of my family," said Opazo. "From there, I started learning how to sew and taught myself how to weave."

At 16, Opazo immigrated to Los Angeles. She spoke no English and attended a large public high school in the San Fernando Valley. After high school, Opazo enrolled in a community college in Santa Cruz, where she took ESL and art classes.

From then on, she committed to her craft. She transferred to the University of California Berkeley (BFA '16), where her practice centered around printmaking, wood burning, and a blend of Chilean and Western weaving.

Work at Berkeley was exploratory, focused on the evolution of her identity after immigrating to the United States. She collected textiles and raw materials from Chile and created temporary outdoor installations of natural materials that fused Chilean tradition and the California landscape.

"I was always thinking about work that didn't last that long, work that would decompose," said Opazo.

Such ephemeral artwork pivoted Opazo to a focused practice through the lens of 'solastalgia,' a neologism for existential distress associated with a once familiar degrading environment. As a kid, Opazo remembers growing up in Chile during an economic boom that created massive development that, she says, was unheard of before.

"When I was in Santiago, I kept seeing the Andes covered by buildings," said Opazo. Before I could see them, they were gone. [My work] is...a translation of what is happening in our generation and how change happens so quickly."

Fashion is a form of self-expression: a creative choice, a form of communication and influence. Fashion may be all about image, but the industry's reality is the opposite of glitz and glamor.

In graduate school (MFA ‘20), Opazo began researching the textile industry. What she discovered changed the course of her work's purpose.

While doing research for an art show at a local thrift store in Ventura, Opazo learned that whatever items didn't sell were made into bales of clothes and shipped to Chile and African countries such as Senegal and Ghana. She negotiated with them to give her one.

The largest fast fashion graveyard is in the Atacama desert, two hours from Minga's hometown. Among sand and rock lies hundreds of acres of clothing that never found a second life. Many of those tags bear the names of major fashion retailers: Old Navy, H&M, Adidas, Calvin Klein and Levi's.

This dumping groound is so vast it's visible in satellite imagery from space. It's weight is comparable to one or two times the Brooklyn Bridge.

Martin Bernetti / Getty Images

The Atacama Fashion Graveyard. Antonio Cosio. CC BY-NC.

Chile is one of the world's largest importers of secondhand and unsold clothes. In 2021, the country received 126,000 tons of used clothing. But only a quarter of those items resold, acccording to a United Nations report.

Since the 1990s, the speed of clothing consumption has steeply increased. The pace of such production results in average shoppers buying 60 percent more pieces of clothing compared to 15 years ago. This phenomenon is known as "fast fashion"—the mass manufacture of clothing that reproduces runway trends into inexpensive pieces hanging in consumer closets.

The average American consumer gets rid of over 80 pounds of unwanted clothes annually, and what's trashed is only worn a handful of times. Even when donated, a small number of those textiles are recycled or reused, and 85% of items are incinerated or sent to landfills.

Chilean federal law does state that disposing of textiles is illegal, yet clothing is illegally dumped or buried and then burned in the Atacama. Over the years, fires have broken out at the dumping site, most recently in June 2022. These fires pose an environmental and public health threat to nearby residents. Since this burned clothing is synthetic fiber like polyester, the blaze releases toxic gasses into the atmosphere.

Core Sample (2020) is a sculpture inspired by the Atacama desert made of layers of recycled clothing, wood, and mud.

"In northern Chile, mummies were wrapped in handmade textiles," explained Opazo. "It used to be that textiles were beautiful and a craft. Now they're piles and piles of excess… It's a mess."

Opazo's early work focused on the environment. However, after learning more about the impact of textile waste, she felt she was only showing the industry's dark underbelly. She wanted solutions.

Core Sample (2020)

"I wanted to move forward as an artist and in my practice," said Opazo, surrounded by bales and clothing shelved in her studio.

Most textile waste is synthetic material, which is a kind of plastic. Plastics never really decompose—plastics shrink, a process that can take 20 to 500 years.

"I started thinking about all this massive amount of clothing I have in my studio that I don't know what to do with," said Opazo.

So, she began asking questions to approach the problem of post-consumer textiles.

“Is there a way to make this clothing disappear?"

“Is there a way for textile waste to not be a problem anymore?"

And dug for a solution to textile pollution.

Oyster mushrooms grow in the wild on a variety of substrates, including dead trees, straw, and coffee grounds. They're incredibly versatile and relatively easy to cultivate, and scientists are studying them for their ability to degrade certain kinds of plastic.

Researchers found that oyster mushrooms can digest plastic and produce edible mushrooms. This process is due to mycelium, a mushroom's root-like structure, producing enzymes that break down substrates into simpler molecules that the mushroom can absorb.

In nature, those substrates are dead logs. But these enzymes also explain why fungi can grow on household cardboard, carpets, and ceilings. Scientists even discovered strains of fungi around the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

With the help of DIY Fungi founder and Ph.D. candidate Danielle Stevenston, Opazo began exploring the introduction of oyster mushrooms and textiles while at an artist's residency in Colorado. Over a Zoom session, Stevenson taught Opazo how to introduce mushrooms to textiles and let them grow. She started with denim.

This experiment led to their first collaboration: RE-DRESS.

Opazo's method involves layering mycelium, wood ash, and clothing. In simple terms, she explains, the mycelium eats the clothing, and the mushroom is the flower of the mycelium. Minga's sculptures are unique because she's training her mushrooms to grow on unsanitized clothing.

Once the mushrooms eat the textiles, the sculpture becomes regenerative soil. Her plan is to test the health of the sculpture's soil by using it to grow native plants. She wants to sample the mycelium and its mushrooms to see if any microplastics remain or if there are any toxins and minerals from the clothing the mushrooms can eat and remain healthy.

"I want the sculpture to disappear and give it back to the mushrooms," said Minga. "Before, humans took resources for human advancement. Now, I think we're at a point where we need to collaborate with nature instead of taking its resources."

Opazo's work reconceptualizes the pervasive problem of textile waste. These never-before-seen living sculptures push us towards finding innovative solutions to environmental concerns, like waste, that threaten human survival.

Right now, Minga's biggest challenge is access to a lab equipped to test the soil. She believes that the fusion of such technologies and art could be the start of the end of textile waste.

"I'm still an artist, and I still want to make sculptures and installations that digest themselves," said Minga. "My work is alive and special, which makes it complicated."

Minga hopes her work will motivate people to think about climate change and textile waste in a new light. Rather than making people feel bad about their actions in a world where she says we're all already overwhelmed, Minga wants her art to start conversations.

"My main goal is to motivate people through hope, not guilt," said Minga. “I want to be like, 'Hey, we can find a creative solution to [textile waste], and motivate people to think … there's a problem, and there's gotta be a solution for it, instead of just turning a blind eye.”

Minga's current exhibition, "Power in Every Thread," is showcased at the Craft Contemporary until May 5th. You can also find her solo work, After Life at Sargent's Daughters West gallery until May 25th. To keep up with her projects and learn more about using mushrooms to combat textile waste, follow her on Instagram @mingaopazo.