RECLAIMING OUR HANDS

Reclaiming Our Hands: Weaving Workshops is a part of Reclaiming Our Hands, an experimental program that imagines new ways to teach history by centering immersive art-making as an essential tool for research and learning.

Textile production has long been an important industry in West and West-central Africa. Textiles play an essential role in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of African identities through time and space. The cultural histories of the African Diaspora and West and West Central Africa are deeply intertwined through the complex layers of social and ritual meaning stretching back millennia. These workshops, focusing on the upright loom weaving traditions of Nigeria, Benin Republic, Togo, and Cameroon, seek to illuminate these multifaceted histories through making. In learning about these complex histories of production, trade, and exploitation, the act of weaving creates space for reclamation and radical imagination.

A project by Stephen Hamilton.