Projecting Dreams Onto the Blanket of the Sky

In the framework of our 11-days-long programme LET'S SIT DOWN TOGETHER AND TALK ABOUT A LITTLE CULTURE, join us for a textile workshop in which we invite you to work with textile to make a fabric out of our experiences and dreams. 

Performative warm-ups will prompt interactions between persons and our ways of being with/on the territory of Berlin and other territories, our dreams. The participants are invited to sketch moments of these movement interactions on paper, then to select shapes, colors and textures of cloth to compose their embodied drawings/mappings. The cloth shapes are then sewn or glued onto a larger cloth background that contains them.

We will create a textile which we will hang on the wall at SAVVY during the time of this programme. On this textile, elements of dreams are appliqued and interconnected with each other.

The workshop will be lead by mitkollektiv – a group of artists and educators who co-design artistic interventions in educational contexts in an intersectional and anti-racist way. Two artists of this collective, Karen Michelsen and Katie Lee Dunbar, will perform a creative group process with fabrics. Here the participants will experiment ways of being and creating together in the same space, from their stories, their memories, their bodies and dreams, trying out new languages.n.

Katie Lee Dunbar  is an educator, queer feminist performer and visual artist. Katie Lee Dunbar was born in Stoke-on-Trent, UK and has been based in Berlin since 2009. As a non-binary, queer feminist performance maker, educator, activist and researcher they explore themes of disparity, intimacy and the intersection between the personal and political through their practice in dance, voice, memory, sound, text and installation. Their collective work centres around maintaining non-oppressive spaces for exchange, as seen in their role as project coordinator for arted, an Erasmus+ project led by Leeds Beckett University.

Karen Michelsen Castañón is an artist, filmmaker and also works in educational contexts. In her work, she hse been heavily influenced by textile cultures in the Americas/Abya Yala, in which textiles are a means of material communication and a manifestation of ancestral philosophies. She is  particularly interested in the ways (colonial) her/histories are told. Often a personal experience or memory triggers the historical and visual research behind her pieces, which encompass textiles, photographs, installations and essayistic films. At the same time, anticolonial practices and theories, empowering pedagogies and creative group processes are a vital source of inspiration to her. 

For Karen Michelsen Castañón, ”textiles not only clothe, carry, and contain us. They can be like a body, they can echo her/histories and relationships to land/territories beyond colonial borders.”