Abstract

This research-creation invited the collaboration of Barefoot College’s 2018-2019 solar engineering cohort to embark upon an art-led participatory process (ALPP) involving the making of a textile map and “Let Me Show You” moments of skillshare. The co-participants were women who travelled from around the world to gather for a six-month solar engineering program on a rural campus located in Rajasthan, India. Through this participatory process and our artful making, we shared stories of home and travel, and forged community, contributing to the social fabric of that place, for a while. This is an account of this research process, the feminist and Indigenous epistemologies that provided a theoretical groundwork, ALPP and emergent strategy that guided the methodology of the researcher, and the literature that contextualized this project. As with any socially-engaged arts project that seeks reciprocal relationships with community partners or participants, the outcomes of this research were necessarily emergent, guided by the interests of the group. Initial research questions concerning articulating and relating to place through textile mapping provided a departure point, but as we worked, a new research question came into focus: how can collective making serve to strengthen ties and encourage place-making in an ephemeral community context? Over the course of two months, we learned how textile practices (basket weaving, embroidery and natural dyeing) are a form of storytelling that can transcend spoken word and weave connection across difference, connection to one another, to our sense of place, to an expanded imagination.