@timorissanen
he/him | researcher, artist, designer working on unceded Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia) | fashion, textiles, design and sustainability; birds and extinction; queer materialities | 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🍉 https://timorissanen.com
Last week the Dialogical Bodies issue of APRIA was published, including my paper. Having had almost a year reflecting on it and reading deeper in the field, I see all its flaws and gaps. All good: I see those as seeds for further research, already underway.
apria.artez.nl/gear-maketh-...
Today is World AIDS Day and we continue to grieve, in rage.
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...
The IUCN press release about the Red List updates: iucn.org/press-releas... Our project is on a pause but of course the extinction crisis trundles on, whether we personally tend to it or not.
Six years ago as part of Precarious Birds with @zoesadokierski.bsky.social I wrote about the Slender-billed Curlew, now declared extinct by the IUCN: precariousbirds.net/portfolio/nu... To be fair it was likely extinct even 20 years ago. But the ‘official’ declaration always stings.
Just putting this out into the world. Come March next year I’ll be looking for #PostDoc research assistant work in Sydney (or remote). Please keep me in mind and send any ideas my way. Looking for projects in one or any of #EnergyTransitions #Decarbonisation #EnvironmentalPlanning #HumanGeography
Some thoughts on fast fashion. Like I say in the post, I’d rather be on a dance floor with other queers than continue to talk and write about fast fashion, but here we are (again). timorissanen.wordpress.com/2025/10/08/o...
Can you help us boost this signal? UTS colleagues are doing a governance project to talk back to the consultant led 'reform' of their university.
Please repost!! UTS people please have your say!
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
That in the real world we’re getting buried in plastic slop and in the virtual world in AI slop seems a fitting end to the capitalist paradigm.
More AI slop from academia.edu: I got two of these emails regarding conference papers I wrote 20 years ago. Definitely deleting the account this week.
I’ve been dealing with severe insomnia for five months thanks to the uncertainty of the nebulous UTS ‘operational sustainability initiative’ and the 400 redundancies, and still I turn up to work every day and deliver. This headline from AFR is tone deaf.
www.afr.com/work-and-car...
Yesterday I had a conversation with a PhD candidate about how circularity is not neat like in the diagrams we present about it. Today was a reminder. Yet the very embodied experience of sorting and packing was also vitalising. I’m glad I did it and I will happily volunteer for Thread Together again.
The second half I sorted jeans into sizes. Boxing 30+ pairs from a brand, each labelled zero waste, was sobering. And to be clear, I wouldn’t demonise a brand for this. There are myriad reasons why inventory happens. Years ago an error by me led to 400 denim jackets being made with wrong size label
Of course this is not a solution to overproduction and TT have never claimed to be. It is profoundly meaningful work. And difficult: I didn’t know anything about the person besides size, yet was making choices for them. I really hope they like some of what I picked.
Spent the morning with my colleague Dr Lisa Lake volunteering at Thread Together, a not-for-profit that distributes brand new clothes to people in need. The clothes are unsold inventory donated by brands. Packing a box of 40 items for a person in rural NSW, the impact of the work hit home.
Huge thanks to Archivist Mel Leverich at LA&M who pulled a brilliant selection of materials in response to my vague brief.
Timo at the archives at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago. He’s wearing a Bobby Goldsmith Foundation t-shirt under his title vest, and blue latex gloves. There are library shelves full of books behind him and the table is full of materials from the archives.
Today I received the scans I made three weeks ago at the @leatherarchives.bsky.social in Chicago. In this research I’m interested in leather title sashes and how they came to be used, which has led me to also ask, when did leather title comps begin? The four hours in the archive were enlightening.
Screenshot of an email from academia.edu saying ‘an AI wrote a review of your paper’
Tempted to finally delete my academia.edu account after receiving an unsolicited email about an AI having written a review of a chapter I wrote two years ago.
Screenshot of journal article abstract. The article is titled ‘Gear Maketh the Leatherman? A perspective on leather culture and masculinities’.
This humble little paper, pending minor revisions, was this week accepted into the journal APRIA. I’m nonetheless chuffed as it’s my first about leather, an intentional act to bridge my ‘professional’ and ‘private’ lives, and a small gesture of giving back to the leather community.
Am I rested enough as I head back to work? No, but working on it: rest is an area of my life that I’ll continue to transform in 2025. Wishing all a gentle and kind new year.
In the nearer future I will present a paper from ongoing research on leather title sashes at Artefacta 2025 in Helsinki in February. This is where my professional and private lives intersect: I’m a researcher who is currently also wearing a title sash (until July).
First day back at work and it is a big year ahead. Two co-authors and I signed a contract for our book just before the break and that work starts now. It’s a book on business models for sustainability in fashion. Very excited for it. Publication will be mid- to late 2026.
As a side note it’s worth watching this clip from the 1993 O2 conference, which was attended by fashion designer Lynda Grose (of Esprit ecollection) and textile designer Vibeke Riisberg. Lynda speaks in the video of ideas that we now call the sharing economy: www.linkedin.com/pulse/lookin...
Kate Fletcher has published extensively on the topic for 25 years. The Routledge Handbook she co-edited with Mathilda Tham in 2015 has a chapter by Sasha Wallinger on the history of fashion and sustainability.
Of course I hope the bird makes it, but it’s difficult to maintain that hope in the context of the prevailing mindset that all of the world is ours to blunder for profit and growth. There is a real possibility that the tattooed birds on my chest survive longer than the species does.
We were part of a cross-disciplinary team that wrote a paper documenting the processes leading to regent honeyeater’s near-extinction. This article is only readable on a computer, not a phone: www.curatorium.au/taja-journal...
Over four years @zoesadokierski.bsky.social and I have spent countless hours with captive regent honeyeaters as well as the people who care for them and work to save them. Here’s a paper we wrote about the work: unlikely.net.au/issue-08/thi...
Photograph of Timo’s shirtless torso showing two tattoos of regent honeyeaters, a critically endangered Australian bird, on his chest. Both birds are in flight, one seen from above, the other from below.
In the past couple of years I’ve begun to put my body explicitly in my work. Questions of labour have been there for a long time at least implicitly, and the body is inseparable from labour. But this is different: my body has become material for my work, or I use it to respond to my work.
There may well be value in ‘de-extinction’ efforts in protecting species that still exist but such efforts shouldn’t be seen as a ‘get out of jail free card’ to justify or excuse the current wiping out of countless species.
