Mateja Fajt (SI)

The story of sericulture in the Goriška region reflects the wider picture of the fashion industry: alienation from the production process and final product, physical distance from fashion and textile production, and the transition from maker to consumer. /.../

New synthetic materials replaced silk; farmers sought jobs in factories; farms cut down mulberry groves and opted instead for vineyards and orchards. This greatly changed the image of the cultural landscape (Ipavec, 2008, p. 51). In Slovenia, sericulture only appears as a boutique asset for tourist or educational purposes in a form of Baudrillard’s simulation (1999). Sericulture persists only as a performative, discursive practice in the form of the story. The absence of economic objective is being filled with the story or more precisely: the story of the territory is becoming the economical goal as a discursive practice of contemporary tourism. The story sells, more than the commodity itself. The shift from production to simulation, sericulture’s transformation from material practice to tourist narrative demonstrates how capitalism commodifies not just physical resources but cultural memory itself. Even more, the contemporary persistence of sericulture as purely narrative practice reveals how capitalism continues to put nature to work even in the absence of material production.