Future Traditions is an emerging project questioning the legacies being left for coming generations. Through contemporary art practice this project seeks out pragmatic ways forward from domestic textile and crafting traditions, and asks how we can be more responsible ancestors.
Amidst growing climate disasters and damaging settler colonial inheritances this project explores how to restore age-old human traditions for a more survivable future.
Future Traditions is a visual arts project enabled by the 2020 Guildhouse Fellowship, with Art Gallery of South Australia and supported by the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation.
Sera would like to thank the many generous collection care-takers, artists and donators who have each contributed to this ongoing research and project, as well as Eleanor Scicchitano for her assistance.
Photograph by Sia Duff
Courtesy of Guildhouse
FUTURE TRADITIONS:
These 8 'future traditions' have been identified from the long lineages of textiles and domestic crafts. These are not necessarily skills or techniques but rather the ways in which these modes of making have enriched generations of lives. The 8 explorations below chart threads of research into each 'future tradition' as well as how these can be rethought toward more liveable futures.
Note: While these 'traditions' have been carried along for generations, many require recognition of their colonial entanglements. Shifts toward using these traditions in decolonising ways are critical to responsible, respectable and survivable futures. Examining these inherited knots is a critical part of this project.
