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

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

Register on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/listening-for-the-echoes-tickets-1280755216329?aff=oddtdtcreator

SOME QUESTIONS TO BE EXPLORED:

• 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?

DAY 1 - THURSDAY 1ST MAY - 09.30 – 15.45

9.30 Welcome and Introduction - Kirsten Scott

9.50 MODERATOR: Kirsten Scott

Panel 1 – Listening and Learning 1

1. Sow to Sew, Seed to Stitch - Mitchell Vassie. (Vietnam)

2. Beyond Objectification: Reciprocity and Agency in Digitally Preserving Vietnam's Ethnic Textile Heritage. Corinna Joyce et al. (Vietnam)

3. Decolonising Fashion – Weaving Care in Designers’ Collaborations with Indigenous Communities. Dr Francesco Mazzarella (UK)

4. SONGS OF THE LOOM: Understanding Meaning, Metaphor and Memory through Indigenous Weaving Practices. Prerana Anjali Choudhury (India)

11.15 Coffee break

11.30 MODERATOR: Sandra Niessen

Panel 2 – Listening and Learning 2

1. Weaving Futures, Bridging Generations: Engaging Indian Youth with Textile Traditions to Shape Sustainable Design Futures. Sakshi Mundada (India)

2. Reclaiming myths and legends through traditional making. Jules Findley (UK)

3. Heirlooms: heritage aesthetics, fibres, colours and textiles for regenerative, local fashion futures. Dr Kirsten Scott (UK)

4. Planetary Pedagogies: Six terrains of being for design education. Tom Crisp (UK)

13.00 Lunch break – breakout rooms enabled for community lunch

14.00 – Film screenings

Talk by Sandra Niessen followed by 3 short films

- Uli's voice - from a sacrifice zone of fashion -12.35 mins

- The Kotpad Artisans – 8.25 mins

- Chola-dora aur sui – 45 minutes, inc. Q&A

DAY 2 – FRIDAY 2ND MAY – 14.45 -20.15

14.45 Welcome day 2 - Kirsten Scott

15.00 MODERATOR: tbc

Panel 3 – Responding 1

1. Integration of the Andean indigenous ´Buen Vivir´ (Good Living) World View into the Clothing and Textile Design Programmes. Miguel Angel Gardetti (Argentina)

2. Woven Story: The Intersection of African and Indigenous Textile Legacies for Future- Making Luciana Scrutchen (US)

3. Decolonial Sustainability and Ethical Creativity. Kat Sark (Canada)

4. Too Much Clothing and Nothing to Wear: Home Sewing, Material Engagement, and Reimagining Fashion’s Future. Patricia Kelly Spurles(Canada)

5. Rediscovery, recovery, and dreaming: the caring practices of artisan designers in Kutch communities. Jacqueline Morris, Fiona Hackney, Lokesh Ghai (UK)

16.40 Coffee break – breakout rooms enabled

17.15 Responding 2: Case studies of TEK in artistic practices

1. The Flocks are Back – The Collective Tornen les Esquelles and the new forms of collaborating in Textile Arts and Design. Daniela Duarte (Spain)

2. Kalahasti in Brooklyn: a return to Kalamkari’s storytelling. Nikita Shah (US)

18.00 Responding 3: Workshops

Workshop 1. Listening Through the Handmade: A Sensorial Practice Circle on the Embodied Language of Handmade Garments. Daniela Yakuel (US)

Workshop 2. Fashion as Kaitiaki: Indigeneity, Reciprocity, and Post-Growth Pathways. Karishma Kelsey (NZ)

19.45 – 20.15

Plenary session, discussion and close.