An understanding, an energy on the beach just outside of Fuerte de San Gil in the Dominican Republic attracts people hoping for a moment to pause and consider beauty: The ocean is made up of endless gem-like drops, the shore composed of countless grains of sand...
Aug 4, 2024
Sophia Valera Heinecke
The holistic beauty of the beaches, like the life of most artists, like the environment of Santo Domingo, is a patchwork crafted with intention – the intention to survive and the intention to realize what was once just a dream.
“I used to dream of doing art, and I decided to do it by trying to do it. The trying allowed me to get out of the habit of not seeing my process as art. The process is the syllables and sounds that make up the language of art. It’s a language to make us feel things. It’s action to create value.” Edgar Garrido often walks on this beach about an hour and a half from where he was born in La Romana to escape the studio. The dream is more challenging to escape. As Edgar absorbs the sound of the breeze through the palms and the smell of the Flor de Mantequilla draping down from the cliffs, he also absorbs the color story of the environment. The flamboyant orange, the lush green, the vibrant blue, and the khaki sands follow him home to the workman’s bench, as does the vision of plastic bottles bobbing up and down in the water. With that inspiration and a dedicated team, Tiempo de Zafra creates one-of-a-kind garments that prize function and fashion equally. “Everything made goes out with a piece of the DR. It’s our fabric, our color, a vision to activate our community to meet our needs”.
Edgar finds himself in the middle of things and works his way out of them as a creative designer at the nexus of art and fashion. Still, our world is increasingly faced with a climate crisis that individuals cannot work out, nor can the industries that have contributed significantly. It is difficult for most people to grapple with the fact that, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, modern humans will continue to experience drastic changes in the environments where we conduct our lives and relationships as the impact of climate change continues to compound. The effects caused by climate change, including declining mental health and hopelessness, depend on the collective action humans take as we move forward into the future.
The artists’ boundless ability to reimagine provides a sanctuary in chaos. Most days, Edgar and his partner in the inception and development of Tiempo De Zafra, Stephanie Bezarra Rodrigues, are not thinking in dour and irreversible terms but are fully embroiled in recovering fabrics and the capacity to change where they live and work in San Carlos, the new city area of Santo Domingo. There is an openness and a constant sense of discovery in Santo Domingo, which activates Edgar and Stephanie’s creative sensibilities more than anywhere else, even in New York City, where they met almost nine years ago.
“When I arrived in New York,” Stephanie says, “I arrived with a skill set, and New York was a place to test it out. A playfield.” Nine years in New York kept Stephanie in touch with the game of discovery. In her work across the fashion industry in different freelance positions, her natural talent for creating rich combinations of texture and color was honed. Her love of pouring over secondhand racks to build her back-to-school wardrobe followed her into her professional life.
She knew she was ready for a change after too many frigid winters and several disconcerting instances in New York where she spoke up about waste and was told to keep quiet. “I will never forget... I was looking at these flowers at the end of an event, the petals just beginning the droop from a day under hot lights, still so beautiful, all being thrown in the trash! The waste of production just hit me, creating these impermanent fantastical environments for them to become trash. Every show, every season, every fitting, and all these leftovers and water bottles.” After Stephanie spoke up about the waste and conditions of work on a particular shoot, she had to stop working with that company. The loss of income was difficult but less so than the discomfort.
There is an awareness of the opportunity to make some money off what others would see as worthless and an added excitement around the transformative process that will take place.
The creative skill set artists activate to make decisions within their work and life is distinct and often shaped by their environment. New York, as we know it, is a place of saturation, where artists constantly make decisions that jeopardize their creative growth, relationships, and health to sustain their income and practice. Simultaneously, New York is also a constant source of inspiration.“We would be out at night in SoHo and see trash piled for pick up, and then you’re going into work early in the morning, and it’s gone. It’s hidden except for when it peeks through the cracks, when the systems fail to keep things clean, or when people move and abandon so much that it is of use just because they can’t afford space and transportation. We can’t live in that world where buying new stuff is cheaper anymore.”
When Stephanie arrived in the DR in 2017, “it was a total refresh” a place she had never been before, but that felt familiar akin to her youth spent in Brazil and Miami. She felt the energy they had cultivated with TDZ in New York was needed so much more in Santo Domingo. Creativity was siloed in institutional spaces, and nobody was showing work in the park or abandoned buildings, the environments that have become signature settings for TDZ shoots with regular citizens turned models or even celebrities. “Being in DR was an instant wow. The ebb and flow make space for the deep looking that inspires our designs, in some ways like New York, but without the pressures.
It felt like Brazil: stuck in time with the architecture, no one was on their phone, and people would chime in on our conversations on the street and add their two cents. It just made sense.”
“Contemporary pop culture here is just like New York to me. There’s a cross-pollination constantly,” Edgar adds. Moving to New York in his youth, he remembers English as a Second Language classrooms as an introduction to global vision and is extremely thankful that his mom took him to the US in search of something better for them both. “We arrived,” says Stephanie, “and learned about the reality of how people live. At first, people looked at us like we were crazy, and yes, what we do is not traditional, but this is an environment where people are proud of the traditional skill set we remix. People know how to sew skillfully, but there is more to what we do than that.”
The first few months that they lived in Zona Colonial brought a way to connect all of the worlds that lived inside of them, all of the stories that Edgar had heard from family but not experienced for himself, and a desire to see those stories play out in their designs. One story they did not expect to suffuse the way they lived and worked was that of the trash carpets on the ocean surface along the shore that would appear after even one strong storm. Stephanie recalls, “Online, I would see things about the gyre, then move on to the next thing for a while, but it always stayed in the back of my mind because it’s so massive, and then in DR, I would see versions of it in real life.”
The people who think the way we do are the elders, and we encourage our younger staff to reconnect with them and their thinking process”
International coverage of the enormous amounts of plastic on beaches in Santo Domingo has created new efforts and awareness of managing waste collection. Hundreds of textile and clothing manufacturing companies in the Dominican Republic continue to contribute to this waste, as does increased tourism, aiding economic growth but hindering environmental improvements. “This island [Hispaniola] has a rich history. This was the first melting pot of the new world, but it was very black and nuanced toward Pan-Africanism and its customs. This little section where we are means more than people know. People arrived here with the same impulses that drive us: making it work, self-expression,
and survival.”
Predating the arrival of Columbus in 1492, the first peoples of the island of Quisqueya foraged in the verdant jungle, fished along the coast, and created intricate earthenware to tribute the spirits of the natural world. The Spanish called them Taíno, translating to ‘good men. When the Spanish began to utilize the labor of enslaved Africans starting in 1503, the continual waves of rebellion led by Taíno Caciques shifted to focused efforts to liberate the enslaved and join with them in fighting against sugar cane plantation owners. British Pirates and Spanish, French, Dutch, and Americans colonized or occupied the island between the 15th and 20th centuries. Contrasting the frenetic and destructive discovery, rediscovery, and abandonment of Hispaniola by these outside forces, Taíno heritage gives all Dominican, Haitian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican people a unique shared identity.
After two months of living in Santo Domingo, navigating the new landscape, and finding their footing, Edgar and Stephanie found three large bags of scraps. Realizing the scraps came from a nearby tailor shop, they introduced themselves and started to build a relationship, returning to the shop weekly. While this shaped what they could make, it also shaped how they connected with this skilled tailor and to other shops and factory floors where clothes were produced. “Early on, we arranged to pick up bags from a shirt-making factory on a Friday. We were told by the factory manager, ‘Oh, just see the cleaning lady. She will have the bag.’ So we show up on Friday, and everyone has left except one guy who tells us the cleaning lady is sick. So we ask, ‘Where’s the broom closet,’ get the bag and sweep. And what was littered across that floor was so special, these strange corner pieces...” These oddball leftovers, front panel pleats at the shoulder intersection of what should have been dress shirts, would become the foundation of the strips to make Tiempo de Zafras’ first signature pieces, Pre-Consumer Alforza sunhats. While the exploration in this first phase of their work has remained crucial to the team, they solidified through these conversations with tailors and factories the importance of creating a collection system. What is collected and saved from other small businesses across the city is coupled with the distinct findings from frequent trips to the local Mercado la pulga, or flea market.
Before 2021, the Mercado they frequent was a city block-long stretch of tables manned by local vendors who buy bales of garments from intermediate merchants. These intermediate merchants are likely buying what secondhand charity chains like Goodwill or Salvation Army cannot sell elsewhere in the world. The vendors purchase these goods at what is known as recovery centers, buying in bale quantities. The vendors deconstruct the bales, discerning what can be resold piece by piece based on quality, brand, and type of item, what can be re-baled for a bulk price, and what should be discarded. Though the market still exists underneath the same overpass, it is quite different in its structure and pricing and has gained more attention and government intervention. It has become a central point for material collection in the current workflow of Tiempo de Zafra, but it was not their first key source. “My personal goal was to create a textile recycling resource for the community, consolidating directly from different tailors and factories. I wanted to have no fabric end up in landfills at all.” Stephanie says. One day, TDZ will evolve to enact exactly this vision, to be a further resource of free fabric to the whole community. For the moment, everyone involved in their work believes that the type of intervention they can achieve is critical. Stephanie and Edgar are proud to say their studio sends no fabric onto landfills, even as the team and demand for their designs expands. They try as often as possible to work with ripped or stained material that would otherwise end up in landfills. Vendors often set things aside for the TDZ team that they otherwise couldn’t sell.
“There is a very ripe need to revisit their relationships with family, friends, and each other as the foundation of sustainability. The foundation of an environmentally sustainable business is sustainable relationships. It is an ecological understanding that if one person walks away, their knowledge and connections are also gone.”
Deconstruction is the first thing that happens with any garment that arrives in the TDZ studio. Consideration then takes over as the process of deep looking that inspires the brand is applied to reframe, to question: what could this shirt collar become? Where might this odd button add friendliness? How many pockets can pants really hold? Divergent thinking is another skill common among artists but applied by Edgar and Stephanie with something approaching mastery. They exist in relationship with the material that arrives on the table. They let go of what once lived while simultaneously never forgetting where it came from, the excitement of the vendors at the market when they handed off the pieces picked just for them. The way they live and work exists in the lineage of the Yoruba aphorism, Aye loja; Orun nile, which means the world is a marketplace, and the spirit world is home. What is collected in the proverbial marketplace is a mix of physical material and transcendent wisdom that creates a foundation for the interactions between the many communities that have become one in the Dominican Republic.
Edgar speaks about their studio neighbors and the community around them with a fondness that sounds warm, like coastal sunshine. “People walk around the neighborhood once a week to ask if you have any beer bottles or metals. They’re excited to see what you have and greet you and come to know you. You start to understand that anything they find can be transformed into something else. Their whole economy thrives on informality, a use for secondhand goods of all kinds, parts and materials, furniture and electronics, and definitely apparel. People see that these used items still have more life”. “There is a need for speed implanted into us in New York and the West, asking this question of ‘what’s next’ to a fault. In DR, things aren’t instantaneous; you must look harder and wait longer. Because of that,” Stephanie adds, “we can’t pay people to do this first part of our work. We are the networkers.” And they mean that in both the external and internal sense, building a network of contacts across the city to collect raw material, across the globe to get the word out, and across the studio table in creating the tapestry that is the beginning of each unique piece, whether it is a custom commission or one of the signature pieces invented by Edgar and Stephanie.
“No custom piece is alike. We hand sew many pieces when we reach the step of doing finishings and because of our patchwork technique,” says Stephanie. “We were out one day doing a shoot, and a few people were gathering to watch the model, watch the fabric move in the air, and someone goes, ‘That is luxury! That is from Europe.’ For a moment, we stopped the shoot, and we all turned around to explain.
“Me sentí tan bien al decir: ‘No, todo esto, nosotros, el tejido, las ideas, incluso la modelo, todo es de aquí mismo”. The humility that rides alongside TDZ has a flavor of magic that hums in a particular way when both Edgar and Stephanie, separately and together, say what they do is not rocket science. After garments arrive in the studio and are deconstructed, the fabric is sorted and stored to be easily rediscovered when creating a new piece. Then a color story is decided on by Edgar, Stephanie, or one of their trusted colleagues. These signature color stories consider hue, not just based on trends or what could be sourced but are chosen to make us think again about value and intensity. A patchwork is crafted, a pattern is created if they don’t already have one, and then they work with their growing team of four to machine sew the more significant components of the piece. Two or three orders at a time will have the same bits and starts of fabric, making the consumers unknowingly and uniquely connected.
“Talk less and breathe more”
Even when the materials connect the pieces, the patchwork fabrics always create a unique point of emphasis that feels thoughtfully balanced. The categorical language of fashion that negotiates between designer and audience, prêt-à-porter, custom, and haute couture, doesn’t accurately depict this distinct process, especially when considering the increasing number of commissions they’ve had for other artists with millions of followers. “What we do is contemporary, collaborative. We work with contrast. A skirt in all khaki has to tell the story of how much of that material we are finding, the layers, the shades, and the fact that they have been around for so long but still look new. Somebody went through moments of their life with these khaki pants, then donated them, and they ended up in the Dominican Republic.” The element of utility is also core to their vision. Still, even more so is the surprise of subverting expectations, associations, and assumptions about the purpose of a fabric or the shape of a piece being for a particular type of body. “The thing we love most right now is to take khaki pants and then make them into a Utility Cargo Skirt, which is excessive. Elements of it communicate super masculinity, but it’s a skirt. A person of any gender can wear it. A man can wear it and feel masculine, and so can a woman.”
Edgar and Stephanie feel that the patchwork fabric they create is now the signature of TDZ and that patchwork they also see as a space of endless possibility.
“People see things in our work and interpret them as ‘oh, I can ask for that to be made exactly my way.’ It is exactly what they want, but we never try to hide that it’s made from what is left over. Experimenting with making the Excess Pocket Pants, the excessive pockets show what was left from the skirt. People saw it and wanted to order it. When someone asks to make it in black, it’s the same idea. The original is the guidestar, but what we end up with is unique.”
It came time to level up the systems of creation during the pandemic when the desire for TDZ customs skyrocketed, and more staff and a larger studio space became needed. When there were few of those custom orders, the process remained simple, centering the pursuit of what felt good for Edgar and Stephanie and what honored the environment and the intersections of culture. There is more to consider in bringing other human beings directly into the fold, or the seam, of meeting a client’s vision and making almost no waste. It’s an added layer of responsibility. “We are retraining how people work, says Stephanie. “Sometimes I catch staff throwing things out and then remind them we can’t. The look is accompanied by ideology. If people have been sewing all their lives, they are throwing things away and not thinking about them.
“Las personas que piensan como nosotros son los mayores, y animamos a nuestro personal más joven a reconectar con ellos y su proceso de pensamiento”. The four current staff that work alongside Stephanie and Edgar bring varied skill sets and strengths. It is an intergenerational team with four decades between them. There are a variety of tasks done by each person that engages the mind and body and require constant communication. Much is learned and adapted into the regular process within the moments of mistake. Once the staff understands the rhythm and methods, there is much room for interpretation and on-the-job learning across a four-day workweek. Edgar and Stephanie commit to six days a week, though they admit it has been seven in the past.
TDZ is on the frontier of transitioning an entire industry from hidden process and instantaneous delivery season to season to season to something new yet ancient, a mode of production that must respect the environment and its constraints. There are often severe restraints that hamper the flow of their work. With an audible shrug, Stephanie notes, “Sometimes the power goes out. In the daytime, if it goes out, we can still get work done, just not on the machines. We make patterns, take things apart, and discuss big and small priorities.” They both wear many hats, even with full internet, power, and water access. Edgar takes the lead on teaching the staff and fine-tuning the product, while Stephanie manages the communications, additional content, space, and general logistics. Together they work with clients who desire high-profile commissions, and they make time to scout for materials together to fall in love with what they have created and their surroundings again.
On wearing many hats, Edgar used to think little of it. “I think this is true of any artist working at a professional level. My aid in times of difficulty was just work; just go. I thought I couldn’t get tired, but I’m tired.” The sustainability of their business and the intentional nature of every part of their process creates an extra layer of exhaustion.
“Hay una necesidad muy madura de revisar sus relaciones con la familia, los amigos y entre sí como base de la sostenibilidad. La base de una empresa sostenible desde el punto de vista medioambiental son unas relaciones sostenibles. Es una comprensión ecológica de que si una persona se marcha, sus conocimientos y conexiones también desaparecen.”, “We are together all of the time. The work we do is very involved. We look out for each other, and it’s not to say that it’s very dangerous, but there are a lot of robberies. We are artists with equipment, and we have to protect that.” “Yeah. We have a lot of responsibilities. And we need to infuse the process with more cash. The goals have become clearer, and it’s a constant battle to maintain and fine-tune. The last few months have been about meeting demands, which is its creative prompt, but there is less experimenting.” And that seems to denote that they are teetering, that a point of burnout might be arriving.
Underneath the mindfulness of their creation is an environment that reinforces that, and by some magic, Edgar, Stephanie, and the team seem to summon the strength to continue. Perhaps it is an inherent understanding that things are more difficult outside the West and that this is just part of their decision to take root here. Life is not convenient, but life is worth living because of a sense of empowerment that permeates the environment, which can make possibility a reality. “To move with an open mind through possibility,” scholar Arturo Escobar calls it. For Edgar, another inspiration comes to mind. “Bruce Lee said somewhere to be flexible like water, very Buddhist. Water never has a problem going from one state to the other. It might lose a bit of itself, but it is still water. It is still flowing.”
The flow in the exterior landscape is rarely disrupted when the team is among people; when they are alive in the process of moving with the materials, they see what keeps them going, not just the beautiful people, but what the beautiful people have made and left and are in the process of creating and leaving. “We see phrases on cars as decals or license plates,” Stephanie says, “Know the difference between fake friends and real enemies”, “Saber distinguir entre falsos amigos y verdaderos enemigos”
“Habla menos y respira más”, “Sometimes that is what keeps us going. Random at times, but right on time. Wisdom is found like fabric. We take photos of them to use in the future as embroidery or a graphic. It will impact people the same way it impacts us, and we can pass that along. Why ignore it.”. “It’s you and God and paying attention,” Edgar names it, “and you find what your need and more than what you need. The most incredible piece, it is of the moment. It’s so different when it’s organized chaos in a rack, but this is another thing.” Stephanie lands with the thought, simple but all-encompassing, after sharing a bit about how her mother interpreted religion and how she imbues her own life with a flavor of that: “God is collective.” The mindset that TDZ cultivates acknowledges the perpetual nature of energy and perfectly enacts Julia Cameron’s idea from The Artist’s Way that “creativity is the natural order of life.”
And with this order, what continues to arrive is a duality of opportunity for Tiempo de Zafra in the Dominican Republic, and in the West, in the world of fashion and in modern art, in the process of recovering the equilibrium of the natural world and growing a business. There is more to pursue: Stephanie wants to return to video and documentary work and make more space for that within TDZ. Edgar could see himself teaching to supplement the costs of creating an entirely different line of wearable designs. They both would like to see TDZ formally presented in a major store without compromising the drive toward sustainability. Stephanie continues: “When I think about fashion overall, even these lines and brands that have been around claiming to be upcycled, sustainable, well, nothing is 100 percent sustainable yet. There’s shipping, there are threads, all the little factors. It’s all still loading.” Edgar agrees, adding, “I don’t know if fashion is the right vehicle or connector. Art is the community connector, but there has to be a product behind it. What we do here is part art, part product, and part is genuinely what I think we have both wanted to do, which is to communicate. Good communication sustains everything. Life works based on communities. A community that embraces what you believe in is a life-changing experience.”
Photography by TDZ Archives
