Printed textiles
& Community

Our relationship to fabrics begins right after the birth.
Clothes protect us from the climate and it is our second skin to interact with others in a society.
People had been creating for centuries different textiles prints that symbolically represents their community.
All over the world, many civilizations had developed their own drawings and pattern for textiles to express their cultures. In many countries where the printed textiles represents formality as Aloha shirts or African wax prints ( Dutch wax or Ankara wax) are now considered out of fashion by youth while it is a historical artifacts as a continuation of cave drawings that witness our society.
Printed fabrics have an instant physical effect on us and visually creates a sensation close to pottery or ceramics. Perhaps it is because of the traditions that has been part of our lives for centuries and our senses are awaken because of daily use. By observing the structure of fabrics that intermingle with prints, we experience combination of colors as a sound that reacts to our bodies.
In resent time, textile prints are often categorized as without any meaning because people had lost the knowledge of what printed pattern symbolizes. Though my work, Combat: Manual for daily survival, I would like to give the value to textile prints and people in diverse community in the world. I would like to work on the link between individual,textile prints and community by physically over lapping printed textiles and people's faces.
In terms that our globalization advancing perhaps it will be the moment to emphasize the regional printed fabrics and communities that are involved directly.
By choosing what we all have in common as textiles, It will be a way to give a value to our diverse cultures and celebrate the present creation as well as tradition to link the people with their community. It will be an opportunity to collaborate, dialog and share a moment together.
Recently textile markets in some countries have accelerated and doubled their monthly production. The speed and turn over are essential to keep up in the competition. Turn over of design is fast and to keep their business going, they say they need to be constantly creating new designs. In someways it is an exciting period but with the speed are we not loosing a sight of real values?
Through my work, I would like to document, the beautiful creation that was made by people and over lap them with their faces or their fellow community members with their hand gesture "a tool for daily survival."

Even in education,there are fast turn overs, will we be able to truly transmitted to the following generations ? I would like to give a light to production that are still partly manual as i believe that it will be an important quality in the future.

Support :  If you would like to see this project happen,curious of the out come, share the concept of the project, please support . If you are individual
or a company, you can help this project to reach the goal and construct this project with us . The way you can support the project is by

1. Give feed backs
2. For individual
    Donate to creation of specific series
3. For Company or organizations
    Sponsoring the material
    Financing the logistics
    Participate in the production of final work

aim:
To give the value relationships between textile prints and people (community)
To offer a space for individual thoughts and expressions, by participating to recognize themselves as part of a community and offer their presence to the public as an encouragement.
To create a moment of encounter, dialog and collaborations through creative process.

Goal :
To create a visual art works that will refer to diverse community that is linked to printed textiles today with high lights of tradition and manual skills.
To archive the created works to vision the world today where new technology are changing the world of textile prints that reflects our daily lives.

Final work :
Portraits transferred manually to printed fabrics.
The size of the work will be decided with organizer.
Website that archives works created in diverse community.
Printed documents and publishing book.
Exhibition in local community and outside of the community.

What:
To make series of works in the project
"Combat , Manual for daily survival" in diverse
places in the world with a community that traditionally creates textile prints.

WHO:
a community of textile prints, artisans, group of people who live in the place of textile are made or use them in daily levels .

How:
To seek advice from historians and researcher specialized in printed textiles to determinate the places and communities.
To get in contact with potential partners and communities to determine the possibility and period of creation.
With collaboration from local partners, create the work with chosen community.
Participants are photographed with their chosen hand gestures.
The image will be changed into Black and white then transferred to the chosen printed fabrics. Mounted on canvas and presented for viewing within the space of their community.

How long:
Depending of the number of participants, workshop should be split into three periods.
Period: 10 days to 3 weeks
Presentation of the projects, discussion and photograph the portraits and surroundings.
The transfer of the portraits on printed textiles, mounting them on a canvas. Exhibition of the works.

The country of interest:
Java,Indonesia, Batik
Iwate, Japan, Okinawa,Japan, 
West Africa, Afican wax
Jouy en Jonas, France,
Hawaii, U.S.A.  main land, U.S.A.
Helsinki , Finland, India, Egypt ,China, Germany, Austria, Switzerland,England