Human Rights Workshop: textiles, memorialisation, cultural politics

York Human Rights Workshop is a space for thinking creatively, critically and politically about rights. Postgraduate researchers, professional support staff and human rights activists are especially welcome. We are interested in human rights both as applied practice and as utopian tradition – we use the term broadly, to include human rights, feminist, social justice, environmental, indigenous and other forms of activism. Participants as well as discussants are invited to read the pre-circulated paper and bring comments or questions. The emphasis is on sharing ideas and constructive, supportive feedback.

11am

Lorna Dillon will present on her work with Latin American activist textile groups (some feminist) - from embodied textile activism in the street and gallery, to online solidarity practices - and reflect on key questions for this kind of work in this moment of crisis and war.

Precirculated paper: Embroidery in Abya Yala

11.30am 

Rountable discussion with Ana Maria Otero-Cleves, Maya Caspari, Harriet Gray, and Pippa Cooper, reflecting on connections between Lorna's presentation and their own work on textiles, memorialisation and solidarity.

12-1pm

General discussion, drawing on questions raised in the presentation and roundtable discussion 

1-2pm

Lunch

2-3.30pm

Starting with a contribution from a Leni Velasco reflecting on the work of DAKILA artist-activist collective in the Philippines, a collaborative reflection on working with artists/practice-based research, drawing on the following prompts:

• Conceptual: the potential of collaboration as method with the potential to transform the way we research together -- e.g. understanding ethnography as an ongoing and emergent activity of coming to know the world together, drawing on multiple ways of knowing; this can involve extended fieldwork but also 'shorter-term interventions focused on making, rather than simply documenting, by assembling memories and stories, emotions, materials, spaces, and speculative imaginings' (Morgan and Castle 2024).
• Practical: we want to create space for 'examination of the structural conditions in which these collaborations take place, shaped by precarious work structures, career imperatives and institutional logics of the neoliberal university and art sector' starting with 'remuneration, structures of recognition and timeframes' and then opening up to other issues we have come across (Pfoser and de Jong 2020).

Speakers include:

• Leni Velasco is co-founder and head of DAKILA, an artist-activist collective in the Philippines and Executive Director of its Active Vista Center, an institution facilitating social formation of citizens as active agents of change and organizing the Active Vista Human Rights Festival. 
• Lorna Dillon: Her current project explores feminist art activism in Latin America exploring the links between embodied embroidery practices and online solidarity practices. She has curated a festival of Latin American art, two online 3D interactive exhibitions and a variety of public humanities exhibitions in unconventional spaces. She co-curated What lies Beneath: Women Politics Textiles for the Women's Art Collection and was consulted by the curators at the Barbican for the exhibition Unravel.  
• Maya Caspari: Her current work explores methodologies of touch in contexts of representing/remembering violent histories, and how contemporary creative writers and exhibition projects are engaging with this. She is tentatively beginning work on a new project, ‘Textile Poetics’, which explores the way in which contemporary writers and artists represent and recycle fabrics and material objects to imagine new forms of belonging.
• Ana Maria Otero-Cleves: Her current project called The textiles she bought: Microhistory, Historical Imagination, and Global Commodities in Mid-Nineteenth Century Latin America, aims to reconstruct the life of a formerly enslaved woman in the second half of the nineteenth century from a fragmented archive; just a few years after the final abolition of slavery in Colombia.  
• Pippa Cooper: Building on many years working with human rights activists and artists around the world as part of York's Centre for Applied Human Rights, her doctoral research explores how practices of love and care in the Mexican social movement Embroidery for Peace and Memory contribute to building and maintaining communities of activists in contexts of violence and social fragmentation.  
• Harriet Gray: Her current work focuses on memorials of sexual violence across war and peace in the US - including the monument quilt and memorials to the 'comfort women' of the Asia-Pacific War. She is leading a project on artivism and gender based violence in Mexico, which uses participatory, arts-based methods to explore the diversity of experiences of gender based violence and everyday resistance strategies, and the power of ARTivism to break the mould of dominant ways of thinking about this issue.