PROJECT

This arts-based research project investigates traditional spinning practices across the Global South and North through the lived experiences of women. It explores how embodied knowledge, artistic skills and forms of practice that are disappearing or at the risk of being forgotten, can be preserved, reactivated, and transformed in a way that can contribute to ensuring a solid basis for contemporary, sustainable processes of design and innovation.

At its core, the project develops a living archive of vanishing spinning traditions, conceived as a dynamic medium for intercultural memory transmission and a catalyst for strengthening social bonds, collective identities, and communities. By combining qualitative research methods, including interviews, documentation, and mapping with processes of artistic exchange, the project traces the life stories of women in Ghana and Austria whose bodies, daily routines and livelihoods have long been intertwined with the process of spinning and textile production, and whose labour has shaped local economies and regional development, but may never have received recognition.

These spinning narratives illuminate the cultural, social, and economic value of women’s work. By honouring remembered experiences and intergenerational knowledge, the project integrates living heritage into a process of intercultural exchange, collective imagination, and creative continuity. Safeguarding intangible cultural heritage constitutes a critical mechanism for sustaining cultural diversity and fostering mutual respect, as well as facilitating intercultural dialogue within an increasingly globalised context.  

Situated within a postcolonial theoretical framework, the research understands textiles as carriers of coded histories and oral knowledge transmission as a vital strategy for engaging with forms of intangible heritage at risk of erasure. It conceptualizes the act of archiving and sharing as a form of decolonising artistic practice, fosters a transcultural learning community grounded in care, memory, dialogue, and collaborative making, and merges ancestral knowledge and emerging technologies, to imagine sustainable futures for textile arts.