ThreaDNA
ThreaDN is a workshop intended to take the participants on a journey through their legacy, to embroider another layer of their family (chosen or blood related) onto their archive photographs.
Participants are taken through narrative and conceptual exercises to share the story that’s behind the instant captured by the camera, what that anecdote makes them feel, how they can resignify it, and, in that act, resignify their own stories.
They will be provided with tracing paper, thread, and other collaging materials like flower petals, paints, sequins, and markers. And then given time and help to embroider and collage their vision on their photographs.
The idea is to end with a quilt of legacy photographs that can be exhibited. A quilt embroidered together to pay homage to the art and craft of tatreez that has been passed down in most indigenous cultures, in my case, in the Lebanese and Syrian folk tradition.
It has been done at Portland State University for Textile Month and the SWANA Rose Center, at Portland, OR.
