Folded Life

In this episode of our Deep Dive series, curator Grant Watson takes us through his research project, Folded Life: Talking Textile Politics, developed in collaboration with editor Jill Winder and commissioned by the Johann Jacobs Museum, Zürich.

The project uses interviews as a way to tell stories about textile politics and the inter-scaler nature of cloth. Through personal use and subjective attachment, textiles connect us to a field of social meaning linked to labour, trade, cultural appropriation and exchange, histories of colonial violence, and to questions of ecology and social justice. This talk will explore how, as cultural artefacts, textiles also have the potential to express values, and to disrupt and dissent through meaning making and style, as has been the case with feminist, gay liberation, and queer sensibilities.