Listening for the Echoes

Description

The Listening for the Echoes: heritage knowledges to shape fashion and design futures online symposium offers a vital space in which to reflect upon a pluriverse of local knowledges and traditions, to gain insights into the ways that humanity has walked (and in some places continues to walk) more lightly on the Earth to create the clothing, products and artefacts that we need, sustainably. These approaches offer a stimulus to learn, dream, experiment and reimagine how, why and for whom we design and make, holding the potential to reconnect us to a natural world and to a distant past whose echoes we must listen for urgently.

The symposium will raise philosophical and practical questions about the value of local and global cultural wisdom to creative possibility-finding – while respecting cultural, intellectual property and avoiding cynical extraction. It will reflect on the contemporary importance of traditional ecological knowledge: TEK rather than
Tech. With six out of nine planetary boundaries already crossed and global warming on course to exceed agreed limits, it is vital to break away from the logic of growth and scale fed by neoliberalism and to revisit those very human technologies that may previously have been dismissed as primitive but which are in fact highly sophisticated.

Presenters from all over the world will share their research, case studies, projects and calls to action that foster resourcefulness and creativity, are framed by notions of sufficiency, use-value rather than exchange-value, and formed through care for people and planet.

Period	1 May 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International