Caring to notice: Sera Waters’ arts activist practice towards attentive and reparative futures

Sera Waters, an Adelaide-based textile artist, in her activist artistic practice unstitches deep histories in an attempt to repair what was broken by settler colonialism for all bodies – human, non-human and other-than-human – to survive with care. Her Survivalist Sampler series initiated in 2019 calls to act. Cross-stitch technique, used to depict flora and fauna or comforting phrases, here is mobilised to mark neglected spaces, cultural denials and absences passed in-between generations. Messages puncturing the cloth reveal uncomfortable truths concerning damages done to Australian indigenous cultures, the land, biodiversity and knowledges. Survivalist Sampler series led to Waters’s Future Traditions project (2020–ongoing) developing a framework to restore intergenerational textile traditions as skills and methods of care towards survivable future for all. This seminar* is an attempt to practise connected thinking inscribing into Waters’s approach to think, write and make with. I invite you to collectively consider the proposed by Ariella Azoulay in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019: 70) different modality of ‘rehearsal, reversal, rewinding, repairing, renewing, reacquiring, redistributing, readjusting, reallocating’. Focusing on women’s arts activist practices in Australia engaged with needlework we will explore ecologies of repair and ways to build truth-telling into the future as a reparative strategy of care. This seminar is imagined as a case study event in a constellation of collaborative activities. These are aimed to engage with materiality of spaces via walking and talking as a reparative practice of communing and thinking together. Those who are interested are invited for a communal walk following the seminar.

*This seminar is imagined as a case study event in a constellation of collaborative activities. These are aimed to engage with materiality of spaces via walking and talking as a reparative practice of communing and thinking together. Those who are interested are invited for a communal walk on another proposed time during the seminar.

Presenter Basia Sliwinska is a Researcher at the Art History Institute (NOVA FCSH, Lisbon). Her work is situated within feminist art history, theory and practice, focusing on visual activism and artivism within transnational global frameworks. She researches aesthetic mobilisation and activation of women’s rights for social justice, women’s agency and ways of visibilising her-stories.