The theme of TSA’s 16th Biennial Symposium was The Social Fabric: Deep Local to Pan Global. Located on the Pacific Rim, Vancouver offers a pertinent setting to probe the impact and influence of settlers and immigration on an already long-inhabited land, and how textile traditions have been influenced, changed, and/or adapted through and by cultural contact. In 2014 Vancouver city council unanimously voted to acknowledge that the city is on un-ceded Aboriginal territory, creating fertile ground for this conversation.
We invited participants to examine textiles within the context of the “Deep Local,” defined as knowledge, beliefs, resources, and practices that are profoundly anchored in particular communities and places, which reflect not only the cultures of the original inhabitants but also those of later settlers. We encouraged investigations that complicate as well as untangle relationships between people and their place, expressed in and through cloth. How is the Deep Local entwined in materials, processes, and objects that articulate cultural identity? How do textiles fuse and/or adapt in the “contact zone” to become Deep Local? We particularly invited presentations that examine difference and diversity as aspects of the Deep Local, the impact of cross-cultural contact including settlement and colonization, and how globalization both challenges and enriches the Deep Local.
You must be logged in to post a comment.