Weaving Memory and Resistance

My faculty fellowship at the RISD Museum focused on interaction and dialogue. My initial proposal was centered around two areas of work: one that I would describe as social practice, and another based in research in the museum’s textile collection. As the fellowship evolved, I also developed a close connection between my teaching practice and the museum’s collection and staff. I will describe my goals, processes, and products of each of these areas of work.

SOCIAL PRACTICES

One of the goals of my project was to develop a series of e-textile activation workshops with groups typically in positions of subalternity within the Providence area.1a 1b 1c

After researching several spaces and identifying cultural actors, I decided to design a proposal with Providence-based poet, performer, and cultural activist Sussy Santana. We reached out to Carolina Briones, manager of Latino programs at the Providence Community Center, who immediately welcomed the project and helped to promote it. The open call was well received. Initially, twelve participants registered, and after the first meeting, they invited others to join, bringing the total number of participants to eighteen.

The project was initially composed of four sessions held at the South Providence Community Library in spring 2024. We aimed to create a space for participants to reconnect with their inner child and engage with personal memories, activated through sewing, electronic assembly, embroidery, and storytelling in an environment of togetherness. Each participant was given a white child-sized dress, which functioned as a blank canvas on which they began constructing their narratives. I also introduced basic electronics concepts so that each of them could design circuits with the goal of illuminating memories and images from their personal histories.

Most of the stories referred to longed-for places, the experience of migration, and lost environments tied to familial and emotional spaces. The experience was deeply moving both for me and for the participants. They asked to continue the sessions, so I decided to add three more meetings to the four originally planned. All of them completed their dresses, soldered electronic components, embroidered, and designed. And most importantly, they all worked in solidarity, sharing stories and building bonds of affection with one another.

The works were shared at a gathering at the RISD Museum on March 16, 2024. The event was attended by the participants, Carolina Briones, and Kate Irvin, curator of costume and textiles. Carolina and Kate awarded certificates of completion during a small ceremony. Thanks to Kate’s efforts, each participant also received artist membership to the museum. These small gestures—which might seem minor—carry great significance for these women. For many of them, it meant occupying and claiming space in an institution that often feels inaccessible to local people. In most cases, this certificate is the only one they have ever received in their lives.

CLASSROOM PRACTICES

In my course Decolonial Electronic Textiles (Digital + Media Department, fall 2022), RISD students were invited to develop electronic textile pieces in dialogue with selected objects from the museum’s collection. The students chose a textile and reflected on the disruptions, glitches, and gestures of resistance that the works proposed. This course, first taught in 2022 and taught annually since, seeks to explore issues related to memory, engaging both with the archive as memory and with political and activist processes—all of which are approached through textile as a living, dynamic strategy.

Two students shared their work informally in a public program at the museum, and additional reflections and documentation of the works produced can be found in the article “Stitching Together: A Pedagogical Model”.

DATA VISUALIZATION

In addition to bringing students and members of the Providence community into conversation with the museum’s collection, I also became interested in exploring the museum’s history. My goal was not simply to track changes in the collection, but to critically analyze what the museum’s database conveys about culture, and how shifting acquisition patterns have shaped the museum’s cultural map over time.

I grouped objects based on the “culture” field as defined by the database. I then organized these into six groups corresponding to twenty-year acquisition periods. Within each group, individual cultures are represented by circles of varying sizes and colors, indicating the number of artworks acquired. However, this model soon revealed inconsistencies and ambiguities in categorization.

Shortly after starting this process, I questioned what the ultimate purpose of this journey was. What undoubtedly emerged is the idea of considering the process itself as a form of research, as a way of "caressing" the data to connect with a certain emotional aspect of the archive.

This research project evolved into a project visualizing the textile collection through embroidery on a 2.5 by 2 meter white cotton tablecloth. I hand-embroidered motifs corresponding to datasets illustrating more than a hundred years of acquisitions, grouped in sets of two decades. In the central part, small LCD screens were embedded to include all annotations accounting for deviations, contradictions, and dispersions.

This fellowship allowed me to expand my engagement with community-based methodologies, material experimentation, and institutional critique through embodied and collaborative experiences. The work developed during this period has deepened my belief in the power of textile as a site for inquiry, memory, and repair—serving not only as medium but as method for connecting bodies, histories, and ways of knowing. These explorations have also opened new questions around the politics of making, the ethics of representation, and the sensory dimensions of knowledge transmission—areas I look forward to further investigating through future research.

Mariela Yeregui is the Schiller Family Associate Professorship in Race in Art and Design Associate Professor of Digital + Media/Computation, Technology, & Culture, and was the 2022–2024 Faculty Fellow in Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum.

• 1a Subalternity is a concept used to talk about people or groups who are socially, politically, and economically excluded from power. These are the people whose voices are not heard in mainstream society—because of their class, race, gender, ethnicity, or colonial history.
• 1bBut it became especially important in postcolonial studies thanks to scholars like Gayatri Spivak.
• 1cHe asked, Can the subaltern speak?—meaning: Can people who have been silenced by power structures ever really have their voices heard, especially in academic or political discourse?