Practicing Decoloniality is a workshop convened on Thursday 30 June 2022 by Erica de Greef and Angela Jansen, together with coalitional community members of the Global Fashioning Assembly 2022. Watch the workshop here, as it draws on our experiences of what it means to practice decoloniality in curating a fashion programme by decentering ways of working collectively.
About the GFA22
The Global Fashioning Assembly (GFA) is a coalitional gathering beyond institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries initiated by the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion (RCDF). Its main aim is to decentralise knowledge creation and sharing regarding fashion — through conversation, through the relational, communal and coalitional and through the radical act of listening across race, age, gender, epistemologies and histories.
The first edition is planned in October 2022, with fourteen hosting communities from New Zealand, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, India, Kenya, South Africa, Namibia, Egypt, Morocco, Croatia, the Netherlands, Colombia, the United States and Mexico.
Underpinning the GFA is a communal and experimental process in terms of collective ideation, decision making and development. Each aspect of the GFA is self-represented, activated and governed, whereby local stakeholders, communities and audiences are equally engaged and connected across diverse locations. With guests becoming hosts and hosts becoming guests, conventional colonial power relations often at play in global projects, are disrupted.
The workshop engages concepts of collaboration that are key to the future of fashion, expand the nexus of decoloniality and fashion, and engage multiple partners and stakeholders across diverse, global fashion(ing) systems. Five key elements that have been productive to the GFA’s development are explored in the workshop:
- notions of listening
- humbling
- hosting
- questioning global time
- translation/translatability
International Fashion Conference: Ways of Caring – Practicing Solidarity
The conference ‘Ways of Caring – Practicing Solidarity’, organised by the ArtEZ fashion professorship and State of Fashion, in collaboration with ArtEZ BA Fashion Design, MA Critical Fashion Practices and Fashion Revolution on 30 June – 1 July 2022, explores how to practice solidarity in fashion. Curious fashion professionals and creative practitioners from around the world were invited to join a 48-hour hybrid conference to develop deeper knowledge on the topic – beyond the boundaries of the fashion discipline. Through interactive presentations, talks, lectures, demonstrations and workshops you could tune in with relevant thinkers, create with inspiring makers, and interact with like-minded fashion practitioners.
Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion 