Register online until 5 MAY, 2023 (application form here)
No. of seats: 20 (first come first served basis)
Our staff will be in touch to confirm your registration – only successful registrants can attend the workshop.
Age: 12+ and adults
Language: English
Date & Time: 6 MAY (Saturday) 3-6pm
A certificate will be issued with 100% attendance
Handicraft as an ancestral practice of resistance is an experimental textile workshop that is part of a research project with the same name. This practice aims to give practical tools of critical thinking and textile making to encourage creative autonomy and independent production, while recognizing ancestry and artisanal techniques and communities as a way of resistance. Here we will, together, reflect and debate about the impact that Fast Fashion Industry has on ecological and social level, we will have direct contact with several different textile materials from MANA TERRA archive and finally design and make a bag. Participants will have the chance to explore and experiment with multiple materials and tools, to have a methodology on how to create a textile functional object from the beginning and to have contact with sewing techniques.
The Instructor:
Susana Santos is an independent Designer, Artist and Researcher from Porto, Portugal. She uses and transforms textiles as her primary means of communication and her practice comes from a self taught learning attitude by free experimenting, intuition, curiosity, trial and error and direct learning from textile makers. Since 2015, she’s been working with community and social projects, as an educator and mediator of artistic and cultural practices. Her textile practice started with the creation of MANA TERRA studio, a sustainable textile laboratory focused on the research of materials, techniques and the creation of different artistic and utilitarian objects and the stories that they tell behind them. All the pieces are handmade with factory waste and deadstock fabrics, materials sourced in vintage supply shops, and natural fibers. MANA TERRA is best known for the colorful and playful bags uniquely designed and made, incorporating different materials, textures, layers and ways of using, making them an exclusive performative object. Lately Susana has been researching the importance of ancestry on handicraft techniques and textiles heritage, and in 2022 started the project Handicraft as an ancestral practice of resistance, a multidisciplinary project of investigation, education and artistic creation about narratives linked to Textiles. This platform of critical thinking is sustained by a subversive way of facing the Fast Fashion Industry, while recognizing ancestral and artisanal techniques and communities and creative autonomy as a way of resistance.
