This text was submitted as a proposal to the apexart INTL25 Open Call
Vietnam’s textile traditions are deeply connected with histories of migration, resilience, and adaptation. Across 53 ethnic minority groups, craft knowledge is passed through generations, embedded in intricate brocades, batiks, and handwoven silks. These textiles are more than material objects; they carry stories, skills and cultural identity, encoded in every stitch and pattern. As economies shift and mass production replaces handmade goods, many of these traditions are disappearing. While preservation initiatives exist, artisans and their stories often remain on the periphery, excluded from contemporary creative and technological transformations.
This exhibition challenges the idea that textiles are static artefacts of the past. Instead, it presents fabric as a dynamic form of data, an evolving archive that encodes not only pattern but also the movements, histories, and hands that shape it: How can textiles help us visualize loss, transformation, and resilience? How can weaving, embroidery, and dyeing act as interfaces for memory, recording not just history but the present moment?
The work of three individual artists come together as a community, weaving a shared narrative through the exhibition. The first Artists textile travels through craft villages in Vietnam, accumulating stitches, patterns, and marks from local artisans along the way. Each village adds a layer of meaning, forming the textile into a map of movement and exchange; the fabric represents a moment in time, a trace of cultural transmission, making visible the process of making rather than just the finished product. Through an embedded digital layer, visitors can scan coded stitches to unlock stories, oral histories and archival materials that trace the textile’s journey and their makers across landscapes and generations. As the textile moves, it becomes both a document and a witness of craft knowledge that continue to shape contemporary Vietnam.
Another artist expands the exhibition into speculative cartographies, transforming drone scans from local craft villages into sculptural mappings of making and place.Layered with topographic data, these mappings transform into digital, interactive landscapes, printed, embroidered, and woven elements map the artisans’ stories, techniques, and village movements. Patterns emerge and become living archives of place and cultural memory through textile-based storytelling.
The act of making extends into a third, immersive and participatory work, where visitors are invited to contribute their own stitches to a growing textile ledger. The artist creates a digital loom, fed with individual inputs into woven patterns, where each row encodes personal and collective histories. As visitors stitch, they become part of the evolving narrative, ensuring that the archive remains active, fluid, and open. The textile becomes a space of connection, a shared act of remembering.
By transforming textiles into data-driven, interactive experiences, this exhibition repositions craft as a living, participatory archive. It invites viewers to see textiles not just as decorative objects, but as records of movement, resilience, and change. In a world where traditions are at risk of being lost, Crafting Loss, Weaving Futures offers a way of reimagining, ensuring that these stories remain woven into the fabric of our shared future.
Vietnam’s textile traditions are deeply connected with histories of migration, resilience, and adaptation. Across 53 ethnic minority groups, craft knowledge is passed through generations, embedded in intricate brocades, batiks, and handwoven silks. These textiles are more than material objects; they carry stories, skills and cultural identity, encoded in every stitch and pattern. As economies shift and mass production replaces handmade goods, many of these traditions are disappearing. While preservation initiatives exist, artisans and their stories often remain on the periphery, excluded from contemporary creative and technological transformations.
This exhibition challenges the idea that textiles are static artefacts of the past. Instead, it presents fabric as a dynamic form of data, an evolving archive that encodes not only pattern but also the movements, histories, and hands that shape it: How can textiles help us visualize loss, transformation, and resilience? How can weaving, embroidery, and dyeing act as interfaces for memory, recording not just history but the present moment?
The work of three individual artists come together as a community, weaving a shared narrative through the exhibition. The first Artists textile travels through craft villages in Vietnam, accumulating stitches, patterns, and marks from local artisans along the way. Each village adds a layer of meaning, forming the textile into a map of movement and exchange; the fabric represents a moment in time, a trace of cultural transmission, making visible the process of making rather than just the finished product. Through an embedded digital layer, visitors can scan coded stitches to unlock stories, oral histories and archival materials that trace the textile’s journey and their makers across landscapes and generations. As the textile moves, it becomes both a document and a witness of craft knowledge that continue to shape contemporary Vietnam.
Another artist expands the exhibition into speculative cartographies, transforming drone scans from local craft villages into sculptural mappings of making and place.Layered with topographic data, these mappings transform into digital, interactive landscapes, printed, embroidered, and woven elements map the artisans’ stories, techniques, and village movements. Patterns emerge and become living archives of place and cultural memory through textile-based storytelling.
The act of making extends into a third, immersive and participatory work, where visitors are invited to contribute their own stitches to a growing textile ledger. The artist creates a digital loom, fed with individual inputs into woven patterns, where each row encodes personal and collective histories. As visitors stitch, they become part of the evolving narrative, ensuring that the archive remains active, fluid, and open. The textile becomes a space of connection, a shared act of remembering.
By transforming textiles into data-driven, interactive experiences, this exhibition repositions craft as a living, participatory archive. It invites viewers to see textiles not just as decorative objects, but as records of movement, resilience, and change. In a world where traditions are at risk of being lost, Crafting Loss, Weaving Futures offers a way of reimagining, ensuring that these stories remain woven into the fabric of our shared future.
VDRS is a transdisciplinary studio based in Vietnam exploring textile heritage, community storytelling, and digital futures through co-designed exhibitions, participatory research, and site-based practice.
apexart’s program supporters past and present include the National Endowment for the Arts, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Kettering Family Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, The Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Spencer Brownstone, the Kenneth A. Cowin Foundation, Epstein Teicher Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., William Talbott Hillman Foundation/Affirmation Arts Fund, the Fifth Floor Foundation, the Consulate General of Israel in New York, The Puffin Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and administered by LMCC, funds from NYSCA Electronic Media/Film in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.