Nel deserto di Atacama, in Cile, una vasta discarica di abiti usati è così estesa da essere visibile persino dallo spazio e il Guardian racconta di una sfilata di moda organizzata per sensibilizzare sul problema.

A staggering 60,000 tonnes of used clothing is shipped to Chile each year. According to the latest UN figures, Chile is the third largest importer of secondhand clothes in the world. Some of these clothes are resold in secondhand markets, but at least 39,000 tonnes ends up being illegally dumped in the Atacama desert. The desert is one of the country’s most popular tourism destinations, famed for its otherworldly beauty and stargazing, but for those living near the dump sites it has become a place of devastation.

Questo deserto è una delle destinazioni turistiche più popolari del paese, famosa per la sua bellezza e sito ideale per l’osservazione delle stelle. Tuttavia, per coloro che vivono vicino ai siti di discarica, è diventato un luogo di devastazione.

“This place is being used as a global sacrifice zone where waste from different parts of the world arrives and ends up around the municipality of Alto Hospicio,” says Ángela Astudillo, co-founder of Desierto Vestido, a non-governmental organisation that aims to raise awareness about the environmental impact of the waste. “It builds up in different areas, is incinerated and also buried. “The way it has affected us the most is stigmatisation, as we are portrayed as one of the dirtiest and ugliest places in the world.”

Maya Ramos, stilista di San Paolo, ha organizzato una sfilata con abiti indossati da 8 modelle, tenutasi lo scorso aprile, denominata Atacama fashion week 2024. Questo evento ha cercato di sensibilizzare sulla realtà vissuta da coloro che vivono vicino alla discarica e di illustrare cosa può essere creato utilizzando i rifiuti.

From afar, Ramos, 32, tasked Astudillo and others with collecting items of clothing from the dumps that would fit into the theme of the four elements – earth, fire, air and water. She later travelled to the Atacama desert to put the outfits together for the show and spent 24 hours cutting and stitching the clothes that had been collected, as well as others she found, by hand. Each outfit symbolises different types of pollution and the impact on the environment. The drab grey shirt that Charles modelled embodies the pollution caused by rampant clothing production. The denim cutouts, layered like discarded waste, symbolise piles of clothing covered in desert dust, while the belt on the denim vest represents the constraints this environmental injustice places on the lives of the people who live in the area.