How might the future of the historical profession look if we take practices that engage the body, materiality, and collective making as ways of producing historical knowledge?
This workshop explores the emergence of historical knowledge through embodied and material practices. Drawing on perspectives from history and anthropology, the session examines textiles as both material and embodied forms of archive-making and historical interpretation. Textile practices like embroidery, weaving, and stitching have historically acted as carriers of memory, identity, and collective experience across the generations.
The workshop focuses on the concept of home as a site of memory, temporality, and lived historical experience. Participants will reflect on their own experiences of home and translate these reflections into small textile fragments using fabric, thread, knots, and textures. These fragments are approached not only as creative objects but as embodied archives that encode memory, emotion, and lived historical experience.
This session is organized into three sections:
The 90-minute session is organized into three sections:
1. A presentation with different examples of textile practices as a way of building memory around the world.
2. The participants will think, reflect and create a textile piece that shows their perceptions/associations about home using different materials like threats and needles.
3. The participants will combine their textile fragments into a collective piece. They will be invited to reflect on the process and discuss how a researcher might interpret their textile fragment in the future and how material practices can contribute to alternative approaches to archives and the production of historical knowledge.
By bringing historical and anthropological approaches into dialogue, the workshop offers a way to engage with the present through embodied and material forms of knowledge that often remain overlooked. It positions manual making as a critical method for exploring how histories are produced, interpreted, and transmitted, allowing for counter‑narratives that challenge conventional historiographical frameworks.
We encourage participants to bring materials like needles, threads or textiles that remind you of the concept of ‘home’. We will provide materials as well.