#1 —
Practicing the Continuity of Home
This section showcases how diaspora communities maintain and celebrate their cultural heritage despite being physically removed from their places of origin. Carolina Sanchez's video examines the role of food as a cultural identifier, Dina Varpahovsky's quilt symbolises the warmth and resilience of Palestinian refugee women, and Jade Harris's quilt reflects on the interwoven identities within the UK, using fabric and dyes that represent her British and Jamaican heritage.
Carolina Sanchez, 2024
Single Audio Video
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15’’
My written reflection and creative project attempt to answer: How do diasporic cultural expressions (art, literature, music, poetry, etc) act as sites of identification and contestation for AS2. In my project, food acts as a site of identification and contestation in the ways it must interact with the populations and modifications around the world that enjoy, produce, and market food a certain way. I look at Mexican food, tacos, and ceviche around the world through my travels, learning to understand how food and the ways in which I seek it allow me to grow and shape my identity through my experiences.
Dina Varpahovsky, 2024
Quilts
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142 x 146 cm
A quilt is a tender object that conveys warmth and domesticity. It is a layered blanket, typically made by women in moments of need, that holds the bodies and stories of its makers and those for whom they are made. Often sewn from old clothes and kept as heirlooms, quilts speak of intergenerational care and promise the continuity of home. They can also embody resilience and resistance. My quilt celebrates Palestinian refugee women from Ruba Salih's ethnography who, unnoticed and unacknowledged by larger nationalist discourses, do their daily work of reconstituting homes and kinships wherever they are forced to go
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Jade Harris, 2024
Quilts
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100 x 100 cm
This patchwork is inspired by the Gee’s Bend quilters and the Korean tradition of Pojaji and their legacies of using scraps of fabric to create abstract quilts.The fabric used is a combination of leftover fabric from sewing projects and a bed sheet dyed using different plants. Tea, to represent my Britishness and the history of colonialism. Thyme as a nod to my Jamaican heritage as it’s used in Rastafarian Ital food. The other dyes, red cabbage, onion and avocado are to make the most of waste.The quilt is sheer, as it is through this patchwork of identities that I see and experience life in the UK.