The panel Threads of Meaning: The Emotional, Political, and Healing Power of Contemporary Textile Art, curated by Lala De Dios within the framework of the Contextile Biennial, articulated a decisive shift in the epistemology of textile practice. No longer relegated to the margins of craft or domestic labour, textile art was presented as a critical infrastructure—capable of holding emotion, politics, memory, and care within the same material logic. The discussions positioned textiles as slow media, resistant to spectacle and acceleration, yet uniquely equipped to address the fractures of contemporary life. Thread, fibre, and fabric emerged not as neutral materials but as carriers of embodied knowledge, historically gendered, politically charged, and affectively dense. In this context, textile art functions less as representation than as operation: it binds, sutures, shelters, and exposes. The panel framed textiles as a site where intimacy becomes political and where touch operates as a form of thinking, challenging the visual dominance of contemporary art discourse.
At the level of personal narrative, the presentations underscored the capacity of textiles to materialise emotion without sentimentality. Barbara Long’s The Making of Mother Material exemplified how fabric can operate as an archive of relational intimacy, translating the complexities of motherhood, care, and loss into tactile form. Similarly, Meghan Price’s Soft Rock folded geological time into textile practice, fusing fibre with stone to produce a meditation on duration, erosion, and inherited memory. These works resist narrative closure; instead, they invite proximity, slowness, and bodily attunement. Textiles here do not illustrate experience—they absorb it. The panel made clear that such practices are not confessional gestures but rigorous material inquiries, where vulnerability is mobilised as a method rather than an effect. Emotion becomes structural, embedded in process, repetition, and labour.
The political dimension of contemporary textile art was addressed with equal urgency. Dominika Krogulska-Czekalska’s exploration of post-textile activism foregrounded fibres as instruments of resistance, capable of articulating dissent through softness rather than confrontation. In parallel, Anto Lloveras’ Re-(t)exHile project reframed textile architecture as a site of ecological and geopolitical critique, exposing the environmental violence embedded in global textile economies. By working with discarded clothing and second-hand materials in African contexts, the project revealed textiles as vectors of displacement, inequality, and responsibility. These practices insist that textile art is not merely symbolic but infrastructural, entangled with systems of production, migration, and waste. The panel thus repositioned textiles as tools for rethinking sustainability beyond green rhetoric, grounding ethics in material consequence. Finally, the panel foregrounded textiles as agents of memory and healing, expanding their function beyond representation into care. The work surrounding Josep Grau-Garriga, discussed by Esther Grau Quintana, demonstrated how tapestry can operate as a mnemonic device, weaving collective trauma and historical consciousness into material form. Therapeutic dimensions were further explored through practices such as Brígida Ribeiros’ investigations into gauze and medical fabrics, where wrapping and stitching become acts of repair. Across these contributions, textiles emerged as mediators between body and world, capable of holding fragility without erasure. The panel concluded with a compelling proposition: textile art is not peripheral but central to contemporary discourse precisely because it connects making with meaning, care with critique, and the personal with the political. In doing so, it asserts itself as one of the most incisive artistic languages of our time.
Lloveras, A. (2024) Threads of Meaning: The Emotional, Political, and Healing Power of Contemporary Textile Art. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2024/09/threads-of-meaning-emotional-political.html
