Call for Contributions The Yarn #2: “On Colonial Violence in Fashion Museums”
The Yarn is a zine that gives a platform to individuals impacted by or aware of colonial violence in fashion. After a first edition focussed on fashion schools, The Yarn is now collecting testimonies in fashion museology. The goal is to share often overlooked experiences. This initiative, launched in 2023 by Antwerp-based researcher Pierre-Antoine Vettorello, was motivated by Françoise Vergès’ call for anti-imperialist resistance, the practice of marronage and Frantz Fanon’s concept of collective catharsis as a method to combat colonial violence.
This second issue of The Yarn will focus on colonial violence in museums, which can be evident not only in explicit expressions like blatant racism, white supremacy, unbridled eurocentrism, and imperialism but also through other ways: in curatorial violence, colonial plunder of the land, cultural extraction, conservation techniques, the categorizations of expressions of dress or in a monolithic universalism.
In fashion museums, fashion acts as a veil, obscuring colonial violence behind a fashionable facade of beauty and unimpeachable icons, with staff members sometimes ignoring or diminishing their role in this mechanism. Fashion museums can embody nationalistic ideals, drawing the line between what is considered fashion and non-fashion. Your input will focus on the importance of addressing fashion archives and collection practices, particularly regarding the absence of histories and the perpetuation of colonial knowledge classification systems within these archives. This zine will be an invitation to decolonize, reclaim and imagine!
The Yarn #2 aims to collect diverse perspectives on this significant topic, highlighting how fashion museology, often perceived as harmless and celebrated in museums, can also be a component of a broader system of violence.
Some examples of themes related to colonial violence in fashion museums:
Coloniality of land and fashion museology
Fashion museology and class distinctions
Erasure of indigenous stories in the fashionable city
Tensions between curatorial activism and local politics
Fashion museology and “colonial time” versus modern time
The colonial roots in methods of preserving fashion
The restitution of indigenous textiles
Inclusion and exclusion of diasporas in the fashion museum
Pluriversal possibility for a future fashion museum(s)
Accounts of colonial exploitation, racism, and extraction in fashion curation.
Corporate/monographic museum narratives and colonial violence
Editor: Pierre-Antoine Vettorello (University of Antwerp, Sint Lucas School of Arts on-going PhD study), Antwerp, BE.
The editorial board includes the following:
Alison Moloney (Independent Fashion curator, Goldsmiths, University of London on-going PhD study) London, UK
Pr. Audrey Bartis, (Université du Québec à Montréal), Montréal, CA
Dr. Erica de Greef (African Fashion Research Institute), Cape-Town, ZA
Mi Medrado (Anthropologist, UFBA), Brazil & USA
Texts may be submitted in any vernacular language, as long as they are translated into English (the editor may do this if you are unable to do so).
You can send your contribution to pierreantoine.vettorello@kdg.be
Contributions are welcome in forms of an article, poem, letter, interview illustrations, photographs, etc. Please contact the above email in case of any questions or queries.
Please send your text before the deadline Sept. 1st, 2024:
2000 words max. for texts (including references)
125 words max. biography.
Visual contribution of 300dpi.