Jessica Hemmings

The Reading Material project attempts a step towards decolonising the Tropenmuseum archive by offering speculative voices for archival accessions through literary pairings with textiles held in the collection. The research approach proposes a triangulation of existing textiles with existing literature and new commissioned fiction and poetry. This approach aims to unlock some archival silences by offering speculative rather than definitive voices for archival accessions with limited or partial provenance. Reading Material is interested in testing a playful triangulation between textiles and texts that span material and literary genres as well as geographies and languages. Multiple, rather than singular, voices are sought in an attempt to loosen the archive from a blinkered quest for accuracy through a single definitive historical voice. It is an intentionally eclectic strategy that moves from selected textiles towards literary voices, and from selected literature back into the archive in a search for combinations which do not exclusively privilege either the textile or the text.

Jessica Hemmings is Professor of Craft and Editor-in-Chief of PARSE at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Professor II at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Visiting Professor at Moholy-Nagy University of Art & Design, Budapest. Recent publications include editor of The Textile Reader (Bloomsbury: 2012/2023) and author of “Towards a Minor Textile Architecture” in Entangled Histories of Art and Migration (Intellect: 2024), “Material Scent: Textiles beyond Touch” in Kinesic Intelligence in the Humanities (Routledge: 2023) and the Afterword to Humanitarian Handicrafts: History, Materiality, Trade (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). The Reading Material projectwas undertaken as Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture (2020-2023) and is published in “Made for European trade by prisoners in Java: batik production in the women’s prisons of Semarang and Yogyakarta in the early 20^th century” (Journal of Modern Craft, forthcoming). Ongoing research is funded by the Swedish Research Council (2025-2027) under the title Carceral Craft: the material of oppression or expression?

website: www.jessicahemmings.com