with the Paul Mellon Centre's young people's workshops convened by Gabe Beckhurst and Jess Bailey
Glasgow Zine Library
This workshop engages with Southeast Asian sarongs as vessels for ancestral memory and cultural history.
We looked at the different forms and patterns of sarongs and Peranakan traditions to consider how gender, storytelling and resistance are explored through cloth. Sarongs invite us to explore gender beyond a binary as they carry distinct cultural and symbolic meanings across Southeast Asia, allowing for diverse gender expressions. The Bugis people of Sulawesi, for example, recognise five genders, and sarong styles shift accordingly; in performance traditions such as Wayang Peranakan, a Malay theatre form, the sarong moves between masculinity and femininity depending on how it is worn.
Participants did hands-on batik, a wax-resist dyeing technique, and learnt to use canting, a traditional pen-like tool to create their batik tulis (hand-drawn batik), developing individual motifs to inscribe personal and collective narratives onto cloth.