Offering (2024) and Clay Workshop 

As part of early conversations in the Routing Diaspora Histories project we talked about ideas of history and time as fluid and present. We considered fabric-based installations that moved and flowed, to be roamed through as an alternative way of experiencing history. Offering takes inspiration from these early thoughts and applies them to ideas of memory and personal history through textiles. It aims to explore how we might repurpose, shift or move through moments in our history that hold us to ransom via guilt, pain, hope, pride, shame. 

The work makes use of textiles collected, inherited, gifted and created over the last 30 years. Some were given to me by my father, mother, friends, alongside those made for and used in my work. Each of them hold a considerable emotional, often painful weight that means they have been impossible to use, recycle or give away. For the last 10 - 15 years these fabrics have lived in a large crate, along with many others hidden away, with the hope that moths won’t find them. 

Repurposed here as visual and then practical objects, used as part of a workshop, the weight they hold can hopefully be unpacked, reconsidered and moved through. 

The Offering workshop asked the audience to explore, query or challenge through discussion and making (using air drying clay) the following prompts: 

1. Where does Diaspora live?

2. Is there a space that offers you relief outside of home, outside of work, or online life. What is it about this space that is special?

2a. If you don’t have a space such as this, can you think about what, where and how it could be?

The workshop considered ideas of Third Space - in combined reference to Homi K Bhaba's space of colliding cultures, creating sites of possibility, alongside those ideas of Edward W.Soja in creating areas outside of social structures that enable alternate senses of the social, community and belonging. 

Damali Ibreck is a collaborative doctoral candidate based at Tate and Goldsmiths University, and is a co-founder of The South North CIC. Her work focuses on the relational impact of inherited and transnational memories within the East African diaspora. She has worked in arts education for almost 20 years, winning an award for her contribution to gallery education.