SESSION: Every Fiber of Our Being: Textile Traditions, Ethnonationalism, and Exclusion

From the revival of ikat weaving as a national brand in Uzbekistan to the appropriation of embroidered folk costumes by extremist politicians in Eastern Europe, traditional textiles are often employed as effective visual representations of national identity. Premised on claims of authenticity and singularity, discourses surrounding such textiles frequently obscure the transnational, interracial, and interethnic cultural exchanges from which such traditions emerged. With the global rise in identitarianism, this panel aims to explore the historical and contemporary uses of traditional textiles in edifying or polemicising ethnonationalist narratives.

What distortions have textile traditions been subjected to in order to serve exclusionary identity politics? Are current nationalist interpretations of these textiles rooted in prior historical misreadings? How do local communities of craftworkers position themselves with regards to homogenous representations of national identity? How do ethnic minority groups perceive shared textile traditions that are harnessed as nationalist tropes? Is the efficacy and proliferation of these tropes further ensured by diasporic communities?

Session Convenors:

Smaranda Ciubotaru, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Session Speakers:

Alice Dodds, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Handweaving and Environmental Nationalism in Ditchling

This paper analyses the Gospels weaving workshop (1918 – 1952) in Ditchling, East Sussex, in the context of the Organic Husbandry Movement. As the Arts and Crafts Movement’s rural idyll faded in the aftermath of WWI, another environmental craft ideology arose in its place: Organic Husbandry. Promoting England’s native flora and fauna, the Organic Husbandry Movement justified its nationalist ideas of ethnic exclusion through the framework of environmental conservation – native plants and native races, in their view, needed to be conserved in tandem alongside traditional agricultural and craft practices. While increasing attention has fallen on Organic Husbandry’s influence on interwar literature, the craft practices at the Movement’s centre are yet to receive sufficient scrutiny.

By the late 1930s, a centre for the Organic Husbandry Movement, Ditchling provides the ideal setting for this interrogation of the movement’s craft practice. ‘Gospels’ seems in many ways sympathetic to Organic Husbandry; it discusses deriving fibres and dyes from native wildlife, environmental conservation, and preserving the tradition of textiles as women’s work.

However, ‘Gospels’ also had an international outlook, exchanging weaving practices across national and ethnic borders. This paper examines this ideological friction through close material reading and archival documentation of Gospels’ weavings, primarily regarding how they materialise an idea of the ‘land’ as both a nation and a biological material environment. I argue the women of ‘Gospels’ – Ethel Mairet, Elizabeth Peacock, and Marianne Straub – wove ambivalently, creatively, both with and against Organic Husbandry’s environmental nationalism, finding this friction a source of artistic and intellectual stimulation.

Veronika Soukupová, Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague

From National Style to Modernism: Lace-making at the Czechoslovak State Educational Institute for Home Industry (1920–1930s)

In 1919, following the establishment of the Czechoslovak state after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the State Educational Institute for Home Industry was founded in Prague, the capital city of the new republic. Aiming to preserve lace-making and other so-called women’s crafts, the Institute followed the model of the former imperial bodies k. k. Zentral-Spitzenkurs and k. k. Anstalt für Frauen-Hausindustrie. With Prague occupying a central position within its network, the organisation connected educational institutions across the new state while promoting dialogue between fine art and craft, tradition and identity, centre and region.

Focusing on the Institute’s interwar period, the paper analyses the lacework associated primarily with the artist and teacher Emilie Paličková-Mildeová (1892–1973). In line with the organisation’s principles, she created designs that were distributed from headquarters to regional branches for execution by local craftswomen. The production was further promoted and exhibited both locally and internationally, most notably at the 1925 Paris Exhibition. This collaborative lacework aligns with the principles of rural modernity, its aesthetic considering not only embellishment but also function and technique.

Drawing on Paličková’s work within this framework, the study traces a shift from the national style consciously adopting folk practices as “authentically Slavic” to geometric abstraction resonating with the emerging canon of modernist architecture. By unravelling the often-overlooked aspects of cultural exchange prompted by the state-supported model of home industry (Hausindustrie), it underscores the significance of the lace-making infrastructure in constructing the national identity of the new Czechoslovak state.

Sandra Imko, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, University of Lausanne

Weaving the Nation: The Polish School of Textile Art and Its Folk Myth

The Polish School of Textile Art (hereafter PSTA), internationally recognised after the first Lausanne Biennale in 1962, offers a compelling case of how modernist experimentation was reframed through national discourse. Emerging from postwar cotext of material scarcity, the New Polish Tapestry redefined the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture. Yet despite its avant-garde character, it was absorbed into the language of cultural identity.

This paper analyses how the narrative of a “Polish School” was constructed through the combination of state cultural policy, curatorial mediation, and Western critical reception. While artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jolanta Owidzka, and Krystyna Wojtyna-Drouet engaged with international modernist concerns, including medium specificity and material experimentation, their work was persistently framed as rooted in the tradition of folk art.

In the West, it aligned with an exoticised view of what Eastern Europe is, while in Poland, it was accepted as validation from a Higher cultural authority. The mutual convenience of this narrative influenced the reception of experimental New Tapestry within the context of folk tradition. Drawing on exhibition catalogues, art critics, and unpublished archival materials, the paper traces how and why the PSTA was positioned as a continuation of folk heritage rather than as an active participant in contemporary artistic discourse. Using a network-based approach, it further examines the interests and negotiations that shaped the international promotion of “Polish School”.

Monica Seiceanu, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, HiCSA

Borrowed Threads: Andean Textile Techniques and the Construction of a Postwar American Fiber Identity

This paper examines how postwar American fiber artists mobilized South American, and particularly Andean textile techniques to construct a distinct national identity for U.S. fiber art, while asymmetrical cultural, political, and diplomatic structures prevented reciprocal exchange. From the early twentieth century onward, weavers such as Mary Meigs Atwater and Anni Albers studied and circulated knowledge about pre-Columbian textiles, presenting Andean structures as both technically innovative and aesthetically “timeless.” By the 1960s, artists including Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, and Claire Zeisler incorporated techniques such as wrapped warps, gauze weaving, and interlaced open structures, citing these methods as central to the contemporaneity of the emerging fiber art movement in contrast to the perceived traditionalism of European tapestry.

Yet this transnational engagement was embedded in Cold War cultural programs (such as the Peace Corps Volunteers) that framed the “revival” of Indigenous weaving traditions as both cultural preservation and soft-power diplomacy. These programs instrumentalized local textile cultures to support American ideological narratives, enabling U.S. artists to access, adapt, and canonize Andean textile knowledge within national artistic discourse. This identification, however, remained largely unidirectional: South American fiber artists did not benefit from equivalent institutional visibility, nor did they participate in shaping the transnational narratives that U.S. artists claimed.

Drawing on archival research and a 2025 field study in a Peruvian weaving community, this paper interrogates the political asymmetries behind this non-reciprocal exchange and questions how such histories complicate celebratory accounts of cross-cultural influence within postwar fiber art.

Sebotse Selamulela, University of the Free State, South Africa

Threaded Witnesses: Unravelling the Memory of Cloth and Cultural Selves

This paper examines how contemporary African artists employ textile and material practice to contest the ethnonationalist fixation on purity, tradition, and authenticity. Through the works of Zohra Opoku, Senzeni Marasela, Mbali Dlhamini etc, I argue that cloth functions as a living witness, mediating between the visible and the remembered, the inherited and the imagined. Thus, I ask: how can the act of unravelling allow us to go into the woven and reconsider what constitutes our cultural selves?

Drawing on Ricoeur’s narrative and linguistic hospitality, and Alpers’ Imaginary site, I position unravelling as an act of translation that exposes the complexity of textile traditions as sites of intercultural encounter rather that symbols of an exclusive cultural identity. African textile practices have been under-theorized in art history, typically framed as ethnographic or decorative rather than conceptual. By foregrounding cloth as a site of negotiating and material witness, this research fills this gap and positions these practices within global discourses of memory and cultural identity. According to Elis (2017: zohraopoku.com) “To be a child of the African diaspora is to engage in a process of unravelling threads, of retracing a path that leads us to the places our ascendant’s left behind and an understanding of who we are.”

Unravelling is an act of translation that makes evident that thread is not merely connective but cognitive and capable of holding histories. This paper emphasizes how textiles perform epistemological labour through remembering and negotiating, proposing a material language of survival that challenges closed narratives and expands our understanding of cultural identity.

Jinying Mou, Donghua University

From Cultural Revival to Global Fashion Symbol: The Hanfu Movement, National Sentiment, and the Politics of Tradition in Contemporary China

The Hanfu revival movement, emerging in early 2000s China, originated as a grassroots cultural initiative driven by historical reflection, national pride, and a desire to reconstruct a civilizational identity through clothing. Initially framed around cultural nationalism and the reclamation of “lost tradition,” the movement emphasized the symbolic restoration of Han Chinese dress as an expression of historical continuity and cultural self-confidence. Over the past two decades, however, Hanfu has undergone a significant transformation—from a niche identity discourse to a rapidly expanding cultural industry integrated into youth fashion, seasonal festivals, and lifestyle aesthetics. This paper traces this evolution, examining how Hanfu has shifted from ideological revivalism to commercial mainstreaming and aesthetic pluralism. Using discourse analysis of online communities, industry data, and fashion media, it explores how traditional attire has been recontextualized as a cultural commodity in the era of digital consumerism and “guochao” (national chic). The recent global visibility of the horse-face skirt (ma-mian qun) as a fashion phenomenon—along with controversies over its cultural origins and reinterpretations—further reveals the tensions between historical authenticity, market branding, and international cultural perception. By situating Hanfu within broader discussions on heritage fashion and the international construction of “Chinese traditional dress,” this paper argues that the Hanfu movement reflects a dynamic shift in the politics of textile identity: from cultural self-reassertion to transnational cultural negotiation.

Rather than serving solely as a nationalist symbol, Hanfu increasingly functions as a hybrid aesthetic and commercial practice, shaping and being shaped by global fashion systems and media imaginaries.