(Post)Colonialism and Textiles

Working alongside students from the OSZ Bekleidung und Mode (tailors class) in collaboration with SAVVY Contemporary: Colonial Neighbours, Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM), the Kulturagentenprogramm Berlin and artist Marlon Denzel van Rooyen a series of workshops in relation to the archives were hosted at DHM and at the CN archive. The workshops explored ideas around power, identity, appropriation, ownership, violence and history and sought to open up discussion and to offer the students another way of looking at these notions. The main theme of the workshops was “Colonialism and Textiles.” The workshops at Colonial Neighbours took on a theoretical as well as practical format, engaging with Germany’s colonial past through the objects in the CN archive, but also dealing with texts by Frantz Fanon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nicolas Bourriaud and visiting a local tailor in Wedding. The students responded to these ideas in relation to the archives as well as their individual practices resulting in the series of zines and textile productions on display.