I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Atkins Goethe conference at Trinity Univ—Texas, on the 7th – 9th of November 2024.
“Colour and Natural Dye in Anthropocene”
In times of overwhelming narratives with challenging planetary emergencies, artists play a crucial role in the unravelling of ecological fairness for a sustainable future. Colour, textiles, and food act as powerful conduits for expressing cultural connections, emotions, and identities, so recognising the history of colour
management, as well as how colour has been colonised and capitalised, is crucial in the greater conversation on the impending poly-crises. The traces of colonisation are woven into our landscapes, permeating the oceans’ waters and our epigenetic makeup and hidden behind doors of deception.
‘Blue has long appealed to the colonial imagination; it dragged European ships across the seas to mine blue pigment from Afghan rocks and later to grow Indigo plantations on stolen land, with stolen slave labour and stolen knowledge.
During my two-week stay in San Antonio and Austin I was also invited to show my eco-poetic film and making a interactive performance with the Students and teachers at Trinity University.
The pictures below is from my interactive Performance with students and teachers at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas! An interactive performance where we met around the white linen cloth, with fruit and vegetables to talk, eat and create colour. In contrast, we talked about plants, dyeing, the history of colour, food scraps and today’s food waste and how food and textiles are connected in today’s synthetic colours and the plastics that we have in everything, which pollute us humans, our waters, seas and our earth.
🍓 We created new colour palettes and new narratives about health, food and textiles and about the history of colonial plants, its colours that were created by imperial attitudes, theories and practices. These new colour palettes enable future thinking, which can chart a more socially just practice of experimental colour, and can ask questions about how will we see colour in the future.
🌟 Two of my old antique and white linen cloths get to take their place in an artistic project that now continues in experiments of fruit and vegetable fermentation processes, across continents, color, cultures and history.
For over 25 years I have immersed myself in the contact between species and woven textile art, colors, water, textile history, ecology, care and activism to shift perspectives on ecological issues of color, and how the history of colonialism is direct linked with our current issues of our environment and krises we know face.
https://www.goethesociety.org/news?category=Atkins%20Conference
“The 2024 Atkins conference topic centers arounds concepts of Welt/en-World/s with the questions of how the human (and non-human) relationship to the “world” is portrayed; whether “Welt” is understood to be material or otherwise; and whether it is the world around us as UmWELT, or as cosmopolitan expanse and colonial space for imperialism. On the one hand, such a focus on “Welt” reveals an awareness of the limitations of parochial perspectives and an interest in forging broader networks and understandings; and, on the other hand, “Welt” points to an array of categories plagued by dualisms or racist, sexist, and classist connotations as the Europeans experience or imagine other peoples, other places, other species, and other forms of knowledge. Conceptions of “world/s” might resonate in terms of, or in contrast to, the planet, globalism, nation, continent, “nature,” or realms that designate gender, class, race, psychological states, etc”
Photos: Anh-Viet Dinh
