INTRA: SPINNING STORIES - LIVING ARCHIVES

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The project places its research focus on exploring how tacit knowledge, artistic skills and forms of practice that have disappeared or are slowly being lost can be preserved and transformed in a way that can contribute to ensuring a solid basis for contemporary, sustainable processes of design and innovation. It aims to create a living archive of vanishing spinning practices, fulfilling a function of intercultural memory transmission and contributing to foster social bonds, communities and identities. It examines, records, maps and connects (life) stories of women in the Global South and the Global North, whose bodies, daily routines and livelihoods were engaged in the process of spinning and textile production throughout their lives and whose skills were of great importance for development of their region, but may never have received recognition. These “spinning narratives” will help to understand the past and value of women’s work through remembered experiences, and integrate living heritage into a process of collective imagination and intergenerational creative exchange. Safeguarding intangible cultural heritage is an important factor in preserving cultural diversity and promoting mutual respect and intercultural dialogues in a global world. Living in the postcolonial era, dealing with vanishing knowledge, we see the potential of oral knowledge transfer, sharing of experiences and textiles as coded history and understand the project as an act of decolonising artistic practices. Another objective is the set-up of a transcultural learning community in close collaboration with local practitioners to make vanishing knowledge accessible and adapt it to their specific needs. This also includes securing material and cultivating fibre plants. The innovation of the project relies in connecting territories of textile and digital art and using Machine Learning, AR and AI to provide creative, yet critical answers to the present and show alternative paths into the future.

Funding

Funding Category

INTRA - Angewandte Programme for Inter- and Transdisziplinary Projects in Art and Research

Status

Running