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CfP: Listening for the Echoes: heritage knowledges to shape fashion and design futures

15 Feb 2025 (All Day)

Online, international symposium hosted by Istituto Marangoni London - 1st May, 2025

The Listening for the Echoes: heritage knowledges to shape fashion and design futures online symposium offers a vital space in which to reflect upon a pluriverse of local knowledges and traditions, to gain insights into the ways that humanity has walked (and in some places continues to walk) more lightly on the Earth to create the clothing, products and artefacts that we need, sustainably. These approaches offer a stimulus to learn, dream, experiment and reimagine how, why and for whom we design and make, holding the potential to reconnect us to a natural world and to a distant past whose echoes we must listen for urgently.

The symposium will raise philosophical and practical questions about the value of local and global cultural wisdom to creative possibility-finding – while respecting cultural, intellectual property and avoiding cynical extraction. It will reflect on the contemporary importance of traditional ecological knowledge: TEK rather than Tech. With six out of nine planetary boundaries already crossed and global warming on course to exceed agreed limits, it is vital to break away from the logic of growth and scale fed by neoliberalism and to revisit those very human technologies that may previously have been dismissed as primitive but which are in fact highly sophisticated.

Presenters from all over the world will share their research, case studies, projects and calls to action that foster resourcefulness and creativity, are framed by notions of sufficiency, use-value rather than exchange-value, and formed through care for people and planet.

Keywords: heritage, indigenous, TEK, regenerative fashion and design futures, sustainability, craft, community, making, place making, decolonised practices

Some prompts:

What might we learn from those indigenous communities that collaborate/have collaborated with their natural habitats in a spirit of reciprocity?

In clothing, products, habitats and systems, how might we move beyond extraction to collaboration with the more than human inhabitants of the Earth?

How have historic local and global clothing and artefact systems promoted creative resourcefulness and community cohesion through making? What communities of practice continue or are emerging today?

What is there in our local and global cultural heritages which may offer clues that could help us to live more sustainably, harmoniously and wisely on the Earth?

What is the value, meaning and agency of the handcrafted, the natural and the human today, in the face of increasing reliance on new technologies?

Can we decouple from the dominant, Western, neoliberal paradigm of fashion? How was pre-industrialised Western clothing produced in local communities?

What might fossil-fuel free clothing or product making systems look like? How might we achieve this? How might they foster community?

How is fashion/design education promoting respect for and learning from TEK? How might fashion/design schools help to repair the sacrifice zones that Western design cultures have almost erased?

Important information

  • You are invited to submit a 300-400-word abstract for your presentation or activity by 17.00 UK time on February 15th, 2025
  • Please submit abstracts to research.london@istitutomarangoni.com
  • All abstracts will be double-blind peer reviewed by our Scientific Committee.
  • You will be notified about acceptance by March 8th, 2025
  • We are open to a variety of contributions – these are likely to include research papers, case studies, calls to action, or workshop proposals, or something we haven’t even thought of. We aim to be inclusive and therefore will announce the full timeframe of the event at a later date, taking into account as much as possible to different time zones of participants.
  • There may be an opportunity to contribute to a peer-reviewed, edited book developed from the proceedings from this symposium.


Any further questions or enquiries? Please email: research.london@istitutomarangoni.com

 

15 Feb 2025 (All Day)

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