Material Languages: The Nest Collective x Stroom den Haag in ‘Our House Your Home’
‘Athi’ by Jim Chuchu, from ‘A Machine Dreams of African Print’
For the past year, the Nest has been exploring textiles as a medium, in a continuum of, and as an extension of, our work in fashion. We have been able to expand on this new work in an arts residency called ‘Our House, Your Home’, hosted by the Dutch, Hague-based art center and gallery, Stroom Den Haag. ‘Our House, Your Home’ invited us to take over the Stroom space, to study, research, experiment, make, discuss and exhibit our new explorations.
The overall textile project by the Collective—represented in this particular iteration by Collective members Sunny Dolat, Dr. Njoki Ngumi and Jim Chuchu—brings together our evolving thoughts about how textiles can help us unpack belonging, identity, culture and design. We consider the following questions: Is there a continuum of textile heritage for contemporary Kenyan designers to plug in to? Can design that considers the truthful history of Kenya create more ‘honest’ textile designs? Can artists and designers break free from the impenetrably difficult question of the identity of Kenya, and create new textile futures from our own imaginations? Are the exciting possibilities made possible by emerging technologies such as machine learning and AI accessible by African artists, and in what ways can these tools help to break the historical design impasse? Moreover, while the unwieldy infinity that is labelled “African culture” is deeply informed by history, it is also a dynamic, shifting, eternally expanding thing, that Africans are all taking part in forming, day by day. As such, what roles can any new and contemporary Africans textiles continue to play in our lives, beyond garment and body covering, in a come-back to arenas such as ritual work, collective healing, and archive?
These reflections have been able to gradually take shape and form remotely, because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, in an online hybrid engagement which we and the Stroom team have been co-creating as we go along. We are really happy to finally be able to share the results of these explorations in the course of the coming weeks!
We’re grateful to Ludmila Rodrigues, along with other members of the Stroom team Michelle Schulkens, Hildegard Blom, Liesbeth Nieuwenweg and Johan van Gemert, for working with us and supporting us through this remote art residency. We’re also really humbled by the kind and warm reception of all the artists we have met and talked to from Stroom’s networks, who are doing similar and/or related work. They have been such a pleasure and delight to hear from and learn about, and they have been beyond receptive to our pieces as well.
Over the month of May, our very own Jim, Sunny and Njoki, supported by the Stroom team, will be taking part in a series of online engagements to present and discuss these new artworks! We will be sharing the calendar for these events soon!