In response to the erasure of indigenous textile practices through colonization, I am lookng to create a multidimensional textile piece that serves as both artifact and archive—a tactile manifestation of memory reclamation and cultural restoration.
This textile transcends conventional boundaries, weaving together physical and digital elements to create a rich tapestry of narrative, reflection, and imagination. At its foundation are interconnected squares—each meticulously crafted from folded paper containing my handwritten reflections and sketches from my time in Rome. These elements function as both structural components and repositories of lived experience, capturing moments of insight, discomfort, and revelation during my exploration of colonial collections.
The visual language of the textile deliberately employs abstraction through pattern and color—not merely as aesthetic choices, but as encrypted vessels of meaning. This encryption mirrors how traditional African textiles have historically encoded messages, histories, and cultural knowledge within their designs. Yet, while colonial perspectives often reduced these textiles to mere decorative objects, my work explicitly reveals the tension between surface beauty and deeper significance.
Embedded within this physical framework are QR codes—contemporary portals that expand the textile's dimensions beyond the tangible. These access points lead to collages and animations featuring Afrosurrealist and Afrofuturist visions I developed during my residency—imagined futures where the knowledge of textile-making and its cultural significance has been reclaimed and recentered.
Additional QR codes connect viewers to a curated constellation of resources—lectures, writings, videos, and scholarly works—that contextualize and deepen understanding of colonization's impact on textile traditions and knowledge systems. This creates a garment of knowledge that viewers can metaphorically wrap themselves in, immersing themselves in multiple layers of meaning.
The completed work stands as a meditation on loss and reclamation, inviting viewers to consider the violence of forgetting and the revolutionary act of remembering. It challenges the consumer-driven disposability of modern textiles by creating a deliberately slow, meaningful engagement with fabric as cultural artifact. In doing so, it asks: How might we reweave our connection to textile traditions not as relics of the past, but as living, evolving repositories of cultural memory and identity?