To rethink textiles as a medium of world-building and meaning-making involves critically examining and dismantling the ways in which dominant power structures have shaped and influenced our understanding and practice of craft, textiles in particular, in the production and sharing of knowledge and as a technological artefact. It ultimately asks the question of why have textiles been disregarded in mainstream media theory and studies. This can be accomplished by adopting a decolonial lens - that is, by acknowledging and addressing the historical marginalization of certain knowledge systems and perspectives, mainly related to women and indigenous populations, and by imagining a new approach to textile as an alternative way of knowing, and ultimately, being in the world.

In doing so, this research aims to re-examine the concept of technology by tracing its etymological roots, proposing a new perspective on the relationship between craft and technology—one that recognizes craft itself as a form of technology. The word technology originates from the combination of techne and logos, where techne signifies skill or craft, and logos refers to discourse. In essence, technology means 'the discussion of craft'. This interpretation guides the approach taken in this paper.

The present research is grounded in feminist methodologies (Haraway, 1988) that look at experiential and community-based learning when engaging with the traditional textile practices of weaving and embroidering, particularly as experienced within the women-led workshop of Traditional Arts and Crafts organised by the Lyceum of Greek Women in the City of Volos, and within the cultural heritage of the traditional crafts of Mountain Pelion in Greece.

In reviewing, redefining, and reshaping how we learn and how we perceive the world, textiles can serve as a lens through which new ways of being in the world can emerge. The significance of the research lies in taking an intentional step backwards, tracing back the way that historically humans have engaged with knowledge creation through other means, often slower, and labor heavy, but that helped create the necessary social connections and practices of world-building during its enactment. To consider knowing as a collaborative act, one that depends on natural, technological and human factors, means to contribute to a more sustainable, inclusive and holistic perspective and reimagine a unique, softer, worldview, through acts of repetition and iterative translations.

Excerpt from Thesis:
As a practitioner in the field of communication design, my longstanding reflections on textile making as a form of writing - explored in past projects in literal or more codified experiments with cloth, language and methods of translation [Rosetta (2024) , </unravel;> (2018), Enigma (2023)] - slowly shifted into looking at textile more widely as a medium of communication.

I started by asking: how do textiles operate as tools to convey information? What are the differences with other media, like print specifically? Can we read a textile the way we read a page of a book? Or is it as if you're reading the entire book all at once, in a single glance?

Excerpt #1

PRELUDE

In Greek mythology, Pelion was home to the elder noble Centaur Chiron, and it is believed that the port of Volos was where the Argonauts set sail. Half-human half-horse, Chiron was known as the most knowledgeable centaur in Ancient Greece, and his role was to teach princesses and soon-to-be heroes like the Argonaut Jason not only the art of sword-fighting and hunting but also lessons about medicine, philosophy, music, and the art of healing with medicinal herbs. Due to its richness in animal and plant species, Hippocrates allegedly chose this place to build the first medical centers of Ancient Greece (Makris, 1976).

Excerpt #2

According to Langlois (2024), textiles function across multiple, and occasionally contradictory, dimensions: from the geopolitical and socio-economic to the cultural; from the collective to the individual and the deeply personal - enabling new articulations of being (pp 12-13). Langois borrows Yuk Hui's concept of 'cosmotechnics' to indicate how textiles, as a form of technology, shape the way we view and navigate the world. [..] (Quote) The meaningfulness of textile here lies in the making of it, in the process of exchanging with nature, of enabling environmental communication with the non-human as plants, chemical reactions and environmental factors. (Langlois, 2024) [end quote]

It prompts us to rethink how communication is an expression of our engagement with the world - one of ‘enacting modes of relation’ more than a simplistic transmission of inputs- and how that, ultimately, binds us to both the present world and the past, while also opening up space for a shared future (2024).

Excerpt #3

When we think about designs that appear on textiles, often nature inspired motifs come to mind. The relation of textiles to natural elements, such as insects, flowers and plants, is plural and diverse. Their relationship is necessary, as these natural elements are both part of the content (visual representations) as well as their making (cotton, silk etc), often surfacing a direct exchange with the surrounding environment and the crafter’s deep local ecological knowledge.

Excerpt #4

Typically defined as Samples are textiles that appear since pre-columbian times in South America and display either textile techniques or visual motifs depicting flora and fauna, (sometimes the two combined) and collected in a single piece of work that informs both ways of making and of knowing. They are often unfinished, in the making - fragments of knowledge patched together. One could say they are a sort of dictionaries, or encyclopedias in textile form. What remains today is their aspect of archival material that documents craft and ecological knowledge of specific cultural communities, defined by a geographical place and a time stamp.

Excerpt #5

The ornament then - produced both individually and collectively - can be found in popular choreographies, collective sports, marches, accents in pronunciation, folklore embroidery. Deleuze tells us that the ornament is ‘more than just a decoration’, and that even animals and plants produce territories by ornamental repetition (Fiserova, 2025).

Excerpt #6

What emerged through this reflection was a need to think with textiles—not just about them—and to develop ways of knowing that are linked to the tacit, the structure and the process of making textiles. Here I explore how knowledge is not only produced but also crafted: much like a woven textile, it is layered, patterned, and textured by history, gesture, and social relationships.

• Textile outputs and textile-making here refer to non-industrial textile making processes which are those of non-machinised, smaller scale, often hand-driven activities that come in strong contrast to the fast paced globalised production and circulation of textile outputs under a capitalist economy, with the subsequent effects that this can have to people and places (e.g exploitation and ethical implications).
• The project and thesis do not intend to romanticize textile-making and acknowledge the labor that is inherent to it.
• Women here refer to the female population as observed in the workshop and as related to the theories presented. However, the wider reference is of women as part of communities that have been historically marginalised from sites, processes and tools for knowledge production by media studies, mainstream theories and patriarchal norms - these include indigenous populations and other marginalised groups that for this limited extension of the thesis have not been accounted for but only mentioned.

a.1-a.7 Instructional Landscape #1, #2, #3. Digital embroidery instructions that depict a local medicinal plant of Mt. Pelion. Images of work

b.1 Photographic documentation of Mt. Pelion

c.1-2 Instructional Landscape #2, #3

a.8 -11. Installation for MRes RCA 2025 Research Journeys, Hangar Space, Royal College of Art, Battersea - curated and produced by Stuart Lee & Esther Teichmann in dialogue with MRes RCA students

c.3. Digital Instructions #1, #4

d.1 Looking at Quipus as devices and writing systems

d.2 Documenting traces in the foreshore of River Thames

d.3-4 Pricking is another way to transfer design guidelines directly on fabric

b.2-5 Photographic documentation of Mt. Pelion

a.12-16 Details of work Instructional Landscapes

d.6 Process, studio wall

d.7-8 Participatory research in the women-run Traditional Textiles Workshop in Volos, Greece

d.9 Process of tracing botanical knowledge and folk art in the Mt. Pelion

d.10 Images of work