The next of the Union’s Local Assemblies will take place in Melbourne, Australia.
Date: Saturday 29th February 2020
Time: 1:30- 3:30pm
Place: Boyd Community Hub, 207 City Road, Southbank 3006
Register your attendance by emailing: alia.parker@unsw.edu.au
On 30 November 2019, the event Local Futures: Local Fibres took place organised as a Local Assembly. Huge gratitude and respect for all those who participated and for the facilitators who have also put together this report.
The event started with an activity called ‘Quilted Discourse,’ where groups had two assigned topics with a series of questions to help guide the conversations. After each topic of discussion we asked the participants to draw or make notes of whatever stood out to them in the discussions on squares of paper. The papers were later scanned and laser etched onto denim that was donated by a local business. The squares were then sewn into a quilted tapestry that symbolize the discourse generated at our meetup around sustainability, community and textiles.
The People’s History Museum in Manchester, England, is the UK’s national centre for the collection, interpretation and study of material relating to the history of working people in the UK and it has a fabulous collection of protest banners from the last 150 years. For any Union members considering how to activate support for radical action in fashion, banner making might be the perfect place to start… It is also an activity that can potentially be combined with a Local Assembly and with the upswing in marches and school strikes, there may be plenty of opportunities to take it onto the streets or certainly adorn our studios, offices and classrooms.
The protest banners at the People’s History Museum combine fabric, stitch, paint, iron-on interfacing, fringe (lots of fringe). The base cloth varies from silk to polyester and cotton. Some are huge, some small…
For Union members who are running a Local Assembly, an outline of a suggested process to follow is here. As is a pdf version of the manifesto. Happy gatherings!
Download here a QR code sticker to UCRF’s open letter to H&M’s CEO Karl-Johan Persson. The artwork is for a full sheet of sticker paper. Ready to print, cut, stick.
The stickers are already outside of H&M in NYC. Something for Black Friday?
