It’s A Wrap: The Nest Collective x Stroom Den Haag in ‘Our House, Your Home’
We have come to a bittersweet end of our 2020/21 hybrid arts residency “Our House, Your Home”, hosted by Dutch art centre, gallery and maker-space, Stroom Den Haag. Over the past year, we have been in an online collaboration with the Stroom team, led by the extremely insightful and resourceful artist, teacher and cultural practitioner Ludmila Rodrigues, to develop our exploration Material Languages. This is a series of artworks reflecting on how textiles enable our unpacking of belonging, identity, culture and design. Following the travel bans of 2020 which removed the possibility of a physical residency at the Hague, the Stroom team invited us to take over their cyber, reflection, relational and thought space, and explore textiles as a medium for material language.
Through a series of online conversations from May to June 2021, our very own Jim Chuchu, Njoki Ngumi and Sunny Dolat presented their projects to audiences across the world. The first of the 3 online conversations was with Jim, who presented his material language project ‘A Machine Dreams of African Print’! He shared the process and outcomes of his use of Style Generative Adversarial Networks (StyleGANs) that resulted in the design and printing of four new textile prints—Athi, Tana, Subra and Bahati. Catch his presentation here.
The second online presentation was with Njoki Ngumi, who presented the process of making her tapestry ‘What We Left Behind’, the use of textile work, fabric processing for memorialisation and reflection. Catch her presentation here. Sunny’s presentation on his project ‘Nanga’ closed the 3-part online conversations with Stroom. He explored three elements in textile work; ritual textiles, sustainable textiles, as well as contemporary African prints via new patterns he developed in collaboration with artists Lulu Kitololo on 'Hopeful Hands', and Monica Obaga on Nandi Flame. Catch his presentation here.
The textile designs were printed and exhibited at Stroom in The Hague in a window display. As part of wrapping up the residency, Stroom also put together a website that shows all the works and processes, including the presentations and reflections from the artists. A limited edition of a ‘Material Languages’ book was also released.
We are forever grateful to the Stroom team for their gift of this wonderful opportunity to explore our evolving thoughts around textiles! We will definitely be continuing with the textile project, so stay tuned for more details coming soon!