Margarita Rivera Arrivillaga, "This is our land: Participatory mapping of forced displacement through collective embroidery"
Forced internal displacement has surged globally in recent decades, as exemplified in the Sierra Madre Occidental of Chihuahua, Mexico, where organized crime groups wield violence to exploit natural resources and control critical transit routes. These groups’ pervasive and violent presence has forced many mestizo, Rarámuri, and Ódami families to abandon their homes and lands. Entire communities have sought refuge in Chihuahua City, confronting severe disruption to their livelihoods and cultural practices. Among displaced individuals, women have turned to textile work for economic support. Beyond selling embroidered items such as napkins and bags, they have also transformed this craft into a powerful medium for sharing personal narratives of displacement and resilience. In one community, a multidisciplinary team comprising a journalist, a photojournalist, and myself, an anthropologist, has collaborated with a community’s internal initiative to share their experience through a series of four embroidered maps on blanket cloth. These visual narratives reflect the community’s pre- and post-displacement histories, articulating loss, survival, and resistance memories. Utilizing a participatory methodology, we facilitated spaces for dialogue, enabling workshops that provided tools for mapping and drawing. This community-based, art-centered project endeavors to connect a broader audience with the community’s displacement story, fostering empathy and advocacy. The completed maps illustrate a personal and collective narrative, engaging viewers in a dialogue on the human cost of displacement. The project aims to elevate these stories beyond the immediate community, contributing to a larger discourse on displacement and cultural resilience. In doing so, it offers a compelling example of how art can serve as a vehicle for advocacy, promoting a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of displaced populations.
Hatim Rachdi, "Oxidizing the Past"
This presentation explores Tamazgha, an unbounded vision of Indigenous North Africa, through a series of artworks that center queer and non-normative gender expressions within Amazigh culture. Using my ME-ThOD practice—an experimental, “oxidized” approach to archival reading—I engage with “other-archives”: fragments of poems, graffiti, songs, and images that challenge traditional archival limits, revealing Tamazgha as a relational space of kinship that transcends colonial frameworks. These pieces position Tamazgha as a space where gender and sexuality exist beyond the binaries imposed by state and colonial histories. My digital works like EfE-ture and Tassa capture unfiltered expressions of freedom and desire, envisioning Amazigh futures that fully embrace queer and liberated identities. Awal and Loubiya Al Ama challenge state control, reimagining authority through queer Amazigh resilience, while Oho rejects orientalist myths, reclaiming Moroccan queer narratives on local terms. By unsealing these layered archives, I offer Tamazgha as a dynamic, trans-sovereign identity where gender and sexual diversity are not deviations but central to a liberated, evolving Amazigh culture. This Tamazgha lives beyond borders, inviting a future grounded in radical belonging and ungovernable queer possibilities.
Maya Wadhwa, "Crafting Protest Posters: Embodied Art and Resistance in Post-Roe Era"
Through the lens of craftivism (the combination of the practices of craft and activism), I will examine a selection of protest posters made, held, and waived at protests after the release of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision. In these posters, gathered from news sources published after June 24, 2022, themes of guns and snakes are drawn, painted, and printed. Each thematic representation and accompanying words indicate the sociopolitical and cultural perspective of the protester, and subsequently, how they are positioning themselves vis-a-vis abortion.
I answer the questions: How does craftivism help protesters address cultural and reproductive fear and anger? What symbols, motifs, and rhetoric are protesters using to situate themselves in relation to other protesters and the broader Reproductive Justice movement?
By close-reading posters containing snakes and guns imagery and rhetoric, I reveal that protesters are using a rights-based approach to frame their claims to reproductive and bodily autonomy. In addition, I argue that protesters draw from ideas of agency and embodiment to make their claims legible to other protesters. I find that the diversity of representation captured in the snakes and guns motif reveals the protester’s unique positions and understandings of abortion rights.
This research will add to a growing body of scholarship that combines, feminism, craft, and activism. I posit the value of crafting as a meaningful and powerful way to channel fear, anger, and hopelessness about reproductive futures. Importantly, I read handmade posters as Art and a site of cultural knowledge production, a perspective that is absent from poster studies.
