Levio Gioia and Moritz Stuker, zalandNO, 2024

The project took as a starting point the world outside the classrom as a space for an intervention. The goal was to have an impact, even if it only a small one, focusing on uncovering and exposing practices that are usually kept hidden from the public. *the project attempts to find and highlight companies and agencies that engage in greenwashing or portray themselves as better than they really are.
After researching Europe's biggest online fashion shop - Zalando - interesting facts and scandals came to the surface, especially concerning the returning policies of the online shop. Due to a lack of communication and clarification from Zalando’s side, zalandNO informs the citizens about Zalando’s returning policies, where the returned clothes end up, and the larger environmental implications of such system.
The project incorporates forms of culture jamming, reappropriating the company logo on printed stickers that appear to offer official discount codes from Zalando. The stickers were added on several copies of the 20 Minuten newspapers – a free and well-known tool to distribute information, which would additionally spread quickly across a city or even a whole country. When the people scanned the code – expecting to be guided to the official Zalando website and to redeem the voucher - they would find themselves on a website, informing them about how Zalando’s returning policy really are and what is happening to the returned clothes. The people would then be able to either accept the exploitation and wasteful way of Zalando or to swear to God to never order on Zalando ever again.
In this way ZalandNO attempts to unconver something hidden and make it accessible to the wider public. It does so by exposing a company which claims to be green and sustainable, while actually being complicit in global problems like sustainability and exploitation.

VIsit zalandNO's website for more information:
https://ranunculus-mandolin-jt4n.squarespace.com/home