Events by this organizer

Textiles surround us in our everyday lives. From the clothes we wear to cover our bodies and communicate who we are​ (or who we would like to be), to household linens and domestic fabrics with which we dress our homes. Textiles are everywhere and hold the memory of our existence. Ubiquitous, they are often undervalued and unseen but under certain circumstances they become totemic, charged with emotion, potent with meaning and powerful in holding memory.
Textiles can be used to convey a political message though use as protest banners or flags – fought over, burned, claimed and reclaimed by different factions. Choices of clothing are used to foster ideas of identity and difference, expression of non – normative behaviours, bonding and tribalism as well as providing a way to provoke discussion, attitude and confrontation. They can also be used in more violent ways as gags, blindfolds, masks or as constrictive garments – corsets and foot bindings.
Textiles have been used in traditional ways to express the political and personal concerns of the present – consider the AIDS quilts, banners and textile reactions to 9/11 – the narrative stitch work of the Bayeux and Overlord Embroideries of their day. Textiles are used in the early years of a child as a transitional object when they are learning to see themselves as a separate being from their mother. The familiarity of textile as a ‘comfort blanket’ means that they have also been used to enable recovery from traumatic events later in life.
This conference seeks to encourage artists, practitioners, independent scholars, early career researchers, photographers, academics, performers, and writers, to intermingle and will provide platforms for interdisciplinary interactions that are fruitful and conducive to broadening horizons and sparking future projects, collaborations, and connections.

Read more and submit your abstract here.

Storytelling is inextricably linked to the history of human beings in a bewildering variety of oral and visual formats. Storytelling is a fundamental tool in communicating and recording personal, familial, communal, and national narratives. But it can also be linked to a process of expressing resistance, of remembering and working through trauma, of breaking silence, of standing up to regimes of power and cultures of erasure. These forms of resistance and remembering can be witnessed in the growth of “communal digital storytelling” embodied, for example, in the rise of shared storytellings of resistance, acknowledgement and trauma such as #NiUnaMás/#NiUnaMenos [#NotOneMore/#NotOneLess], #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo and #TimesUp. Forms of storytelling, resistance and remembering also materialize through protests—from the symbolic gesture of taking the knee in football and soccer, to the Indian farmers’ protest—and growing public interventions, such as the removal of statutes of problematic historical figures (eg. slave owners and perpetrators of genocide) and the renaming of streets and schools across the globe. The ability to re-collect, re-tell, re-write, and share stories from and within the margins brings into focus the uses of storytelling as acknowledging/remembering experiences from childhood to adulthood, of personal stories that can also represent the shared experiences of a broader collective.

Unlike other conferences or gatherings, our Event proposes to step outside the traditional conference setting and offer opportunities for artists, photographers, practitioners, theorists, independent scholars, academics, performers, writers, and others to intermingle, providing platforms for interdisciplinary interactions that are fruitful and conducive to broadening horizons and sparking future projects, collaborations, and connections. We are excited to accept proposals for presentations, displays, exhibits, round tables, panels, interactive workshops and more. Below is an indicative but not exhaustive list of possible approaches, all of them residing at the point of connection between Storytelling and Trauma and Resistance and Remembering.

Read more and submit your proposal here.