Curatorial Exhibition Scholarship

The Making of Barkcloth – Place, Gender, and Trans-Local Community

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Abstract

The Making of Barkcloth – Place, Gender, and Trans-Local Community investigates barkcloth as both a non-woven textile and a material archive that carries trans-local knowledge, gendered labor, and oceanic histories across Austronesian cultures. Curated at the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection (2024–2025), the exhibition adopts an ocean-centered worldview informed by Epeli Hauʻofa’s “Ocean as Paradigm” and Édouard Glissant’s theory of trans-locality, challenging nation-based historiographies and colonial museum classifications.

By integrating curatorial practice with archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with contemporary artists, critical cartography, and comparative visual analysis, the project addresses the gaps and biases embedded in institutional records while foregrounding Indigenous and embodied knowledge systems. Through thematic exhibition design and pedagogical programming, the exhibition bridges material culture, conservation science, and decolonial methodologies. By reframing barkcloth as a dynamic epistemic system rather than a static artifact, this project proposes a decolonial curatorial model for reimagining textile archives as relational and pluriversal spaces.

Keywords: Curatorial practice, trans-locality, decoloniality, material culture, historical textile, barkcloth

How to Cite:

Luo, I. Y., Blumenkamp, C. K., Leitão, R. M. & Green, D. N., (2025) “The Making of Barkcloth – Place, Gender, and Trans-Local Community”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 82(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.22000