A project to make an environment where local tailors play an active role in an urban community of Chiba. These tailors don’t aim for perfect and finished clothes like a conventional tailor, but contribute to the community by making free-style clothes like unfinished crafts with marking pins.

In the workshop ”Person of XX,” participants try to make unique clothes based on a different theme in each session. Old clothes collected within the community are used. If participants take part in more than 4 workshops, they can join the special workshop “Person of Tailor Made.” If they complete their clothes, they are accredited as a “Machi-Machi Tailor.” When they become a Machi-Machi Tailor as a citizen artist, they receive orders locally for working clothes or from individuals to tailor based on theif unique ideas and methods.

Installation “Machi-Machi Market” which is open during the exhibition period is a place for work of Machi-Machi tailors / product trade fair / business negotiation. It is made based on the image of “huge product shelves” on which products made by Machi-Machi tailors are displayed, and audiences go round the place and see unique products as if they are playing in a jungle gym. Foot-operated sewing machines are placed around the structure as a workplace for Machi-Machi tailors. In this way, Machi-Machi Market becomes a place for audiences to meet products and tailors and for taking tailor-made orders.
The unique cloth making and market would create a new place for interaction in the community. Machi-Machi Tailors and Machi-Machi Market will put people together just like marking pins holding sections together.

[Types of citizen involvement] Workshop, Workshop management, Artwork production, Providing materials, Exhibition viewing