Secondhand Speculation Oracle Deck: Assembling Solidarity through the Act of Storytelling

For the last part of Perspectives on Unions, we focus, together with Zinzi de Brouwer (Studio Palha, Mozambique) and Linda Valkeman (The Or Foundation, Ghana) on the ‘Secondhand Speculation Oracle Deck: Assembling Solidarity through the Act of Storytelling’. An interactive approach to working with a set of oracle cards as a tool to communicate, co-vision and co-play.

Secondhand is often thought of as less than new, but secondhand is also what comes after. Secondhand can be seen as the future life of our materials but also our ideas and dreams.

Zinzi & Linda invite you to (re)imagine what secondhand means to you when relating to defashioning the monolithic fashion system, and how you can build collectively on a radicalised future through speculation by using the Secondhand Speculation oracle deck. This is a practice of gathering solidarity by disrupting exploitative human rights and environmental practices, by not necessarily providing answers or solutions, but rather asking the right questions and moving toward the margins.

Secondhand Speculation is a playful approach — Ignite people to play with cards as an opening to talk about the terminology, dissect language and breaking the stigma — giving words a new context and collective meaning by expressing from varios mediums (drawing, sketching, etc) Words and images behold powerdynamics and those can reflect triggers.

In every session we use a set of guidelines and question how can we hold space for one another (and be accountable) by collectively sharing safe space values.

Zinzi de Brouwer

Zinzi de Brouwer (she/her) is a Fashion Practitioner, Entrepreneur, Academic and founder of Studio Palha, an equity-centred community design studio based in Mozambique and the Netherlands in which artisanal communities of the Global South take the central stage in bridging craft and design to form new fashion narratives.

Linda Valkeman

Linda Valkeman (she/her) is an artistic and operational think-tank with a background in fashion design, textiles and education. As a ‘Material Teller’ she explores how clothing mediates and travels between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts.

A dialogue between Zinzi de Brouwer and Linda Valkeman

This dialogue took place after two workshops in Accra Oct/Nov 2023 and one workshop in Berlin September 2023 for which Zinzi de Brouwer (Studio Palha — Mozambique/Netherlands) and Linda Valkeman (The OR Foundation – Ghana) facilitated utilising the Secondhand Speculation oracle deck they designed for their South-South based project.