Afterlives of Textiles
What next?
A central framing question in this study has been concerned with the afterlife of artefacts and more specifically, "How is the storytelling tradition kept alive through textiles?"
The answer to this question involves acknowledging multiple factors including stylistic choices in museums, the newer impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic, and how museums allow for opportunities to engage with artefacts in multiple formats.
Lessons from the Aga Khan Museum
During the pandemic, The Aga Khan Museum dealt with the same question of contemplating how to keep the storytelling traditions alive amidst the restrictions on museums and most arts-related activities in the City of Toronto. The solution was the creation of a digital exhibit on Omeka created in partnership with the University of Toronto as well as a virtual 3D exhibit created through Matterport (Aga Khan Museum). In addition, the use of MicroCT images, Smartphone interactive activities, a digital exhibit on Omeka allowed for the digital world to become a space where museum frequenters could continue to expand their knowledge of the museum’s artefacts while also gaining new understandings of the artefacts through the added benefits of an online-format. Here, the goal was to replace the touch-and-feel experience of museums that had been lost during the pandemic restrictions, and instead, replace it with a newer, accessible approach that could bring objects to life by linking them with similar objects and storytelling tactics. When I was enrolled in Professor Bolintineanu’s DHU337 course, students such as myself only had one in-course opportunity to visit the museum and engage with our chosen artefacts. The students were still able to find ways to engage with the work thanks to the existence of the digital companion exhibit on Omeka which mapped out the routes of the objects along the Silk Roads and helped tell the broader story of exchanges that might not have been easily understood on a singular in-person visit. As well, the virtual 3D tour enabled students to continually re-experience the feeling of walking through the exhibit, even though it had soon after closed in-person following our visit. The use of online exhibits allowed users to focus on individual artefacts and engage with image tools that allowed for artefacts to be seen close-up in a way that might not have been traditionally possible behind a glass casing in a physical museum. In this way, the Aga Khan Museum in partnership with the University of Toronto successfully kept the storytelling traditions of the artefacts alive by recreating the original functions of the museum such as the walkable experience of exhibits, as well as including new technologies to accommodate for the limitations on learning.
The Textile Museum of Canada
The Textile Museum of Canada displays an impressive global collection of textiles and textile history, some as old as 2000 years. The Fall 2022 exhibitions feature the art practice of “Nivinngajuliaat”, a government-sponsored craft reclaimed by Indigenous Nunavut artists as a practiced art form. Two other exhibitions are displayed and titled as “Textiles and the Environment” and “Simone Elizabeth Saunders: u∙n∙i∙t∙y∙”. The Textile Museum offers an incredible learning experience as an environment that engages the stories behind the textile artefacts through tactics including hands-on workspaces, exhibits focused on the practice of textile-making, and the use of description-plaques to describe the broader story of textile traditions being passed through generations and peoples. The Textile Museum of Canada, therefore, represents an exceptional example of the impactful methods museums take in order to keep the storytelling tradition alive through textiles.
Storytelling in textiles is not only about a literal story that can be depicted on a textile, although in many of the artefacts in the museum, the use of figures, animals and motifs portrayed the notion of a story being told through the textile. Storytelling in textiles, is equally concerned with the stories of the practices involved and the history behind the makers and users of the textile. The concept of storytelling evokes the practices of oral stories passed down between generations. Similarly, the exhibition titled “Double Vision” uses textiles to tell a story using techniques passed down through generations of Indigenous Nunavut seamstresses. This exhibit exemplified how stories can be re-told through the act of reclaiming a practice for one’s own way of keeping a story alive. In these felted and embroidered textiles, the Indigenous motifs of community-watchers, mothers, and cultivation practices evoked the broader impact of using the art on textiles to communicate the stories of traditions and life in the eyes of the Indigenous women seamstresses in Nunavut. The exhibition highlights this storytelling practice in the following quote: “women mentored one another, creating a matriarchal family in the process of sharing their weaving, beading and artistic styles with one another” (Textile Museum of Canada). The story beyond what we can see depicted on the textiles is an inspiring story of shared relations and support within the Nunavut seamstress community.
The “Textiles and the Environment” exhibition begins with a plaque displaying the following quote: “Textiles and the Environment highlights how a selection of hand-made textiles from around the world is intertwined with nature and the health of the planet; it explores the life cycle of a textile in relation to sustainability and daily life” (Textile Museum of Canada). The quote itself suggests an alternative route to storytelling: stories can also be preserved through sustainable repurposing of the textile. In this sense, the notion of preserving the story of the textile is not an ideological one concerned with sharing the textile’s story with others, but rather, is a physical preservation of the textile itself, and a repurposing of it so that its story can continually be told in a new, changing environment.
The Japanese “Boro” robe in this exhibit exemplifies this relationship. The robe was in and of itself, a work of storytelling which keeps the function and shape of the original robe through mending the torn parts of the robe with additions of hand-woven patches. Professor Bolintineanu cleverly noted that the practice of mending and recycling are apparent in other art forms, including the Japanese art of “Kintsugi”, where gold lacquer is applied to broken pottery pieces and mended together, creating a beautiful reconstructed object.
When telling the stories behind these artefacts, we can draw inspiration from these artefacts that have been repurposed into a beautiful mosaic. When looking at the Boro robe, viewers can begin to understand the various lives that once wore the robe, including what type of material was easy to access at the time of its mending. Overall, we can understand that the robe is in and of itself, made up of a mosaic of stories. Similarly, the stories behind artefacts and textiles can be taught through observing objects as a “mosaic of stories” with each detail, thread, and use of material telling us a different story about its purpose and its uses.
A Case Study of the Royal Ontario Museum
The Royal Ontario Museum is home to an impressive collection of over 13 million art, natural and cultural artefacts from around the world. My takeaways from my recent visit to the museum are directed at the exhibit titled “A Warlord’s Stronghold: Mystery on the Silk Road”. This exhibit, unlike most that I’ve encountered, was set up as a presentation of essay-like findings in an exhibit format that invited viewers to uncover the hidden stories of the artefact. The case study began with an introduction to the Castle of King Yazdigird, a legendary castle which the ROM research team believed to have belonged to the last Sasanian ruler of Iran along the Silk Road. The exhibit begins by mapping the history of the legend according to local storytelling traditions, and then the mapping out of exploration ventures from the ROM research team.
The storytelling tactics involved in this exhibit helped illustrate the living conditions of the Silk Roads, the types of archaeological findings that hinted at the date of the ruins, and the types of items exchanged at this caravan site. The exhibit laid out three primary pieces of evidence that disproved the theory of the site belonging to the King.
Further research was conducted on Syrian cities along the Silk Roads, which although posed its own differences to the Iranian city, allowed the researchers to draw conclusions on whether the wealth and artefacts found in the Castle was comparable to that of other Silk Roads caravan cities. The research team concluded the castle’s wealth was owed largely to the Silk Road however, evidence proved that the palace acted as a warlord’s lair that preyed upon Silk Road traffic and in turn, gained its wealth through the forcible possession of Silk Road treasures.
In this way, the museum demonstrated how storytelling involves a combined approach of various histories, archeologies and artefacts. The setup of the exhibit invited viewers to become researchers of their own, pose their own theories and questions, and read the evidence provided to then create a conclusion for the Silk Roads case study. Much of the setup of this physical research project inspired the makeup of this Omeka exhibit, allowing me to ask the questions of how individual artefacts can mimic the feeling of inviting viewers to join as researchers on a journey to uncover the stories of the AKM PS24 robe. Within this consideration, a main objective was to allow the presentation of the artefacts to narrate a broader story and within that, preserve the stories of the individual objects.
Now that you have read the stories and their symbolic representations through this exhibit’s use of anchoring the stories on the robe as a map, I now invite you to further understand the complexity of exchanges for these stories between time and space, as depicted in this Neatline map.