plants, dyes, and coloniality

Over the course of three sessions, we will discuss natural dyes, textiles, and their relationship to coloniality, alongside Sofía Archer and Anisa Matthews.

We will expand our knowledge of dye plants and collectively share fabrics suitable for dyeing, fabric qualities, and other tools to help us understand and interpret textiles. We will explore industrial production processes, the pollution generated on a large scale, and put into practice more eco-friendly and sustainable methods from a decolonial perspective.

Session 1 — YELLOW. Fustet, orage, and other stories.

Tuesday, June 16 from 16h to 20h

We’ll explore the use of these plants that yield different shades of yellow. We’ll discuss their colonial history—not only of these plants, but also of the fabrics we’ll dye during the session. What does cotton tell us?

The fibers, the clothes, and the colors we wear never exist in isolation. We will take a journey together through these living stories to make sense of them.

Session 2 — BLUE. Indigo and Other Stories.

Tuesday, July 7 from 16h to 20h

Indigo blue, with its deep, rich hue, is more than just a color. It has a profound history and cultural significance, especially within African American communities. From its origins in Africa to its role in the American South, indigo has been woven into history, art, and identity.

Session 3 — RED

Tuesday, October 6 from 16h to 20h

Information about this session will be available soon.

bio

Sofia Archer is a designer, patternmaker, and seamstress, and the founder of Sofia Archer Lab., a workshop dedicated to textile creation and experimentation. Her work is rooted in activism, advocating for the end of gender through a decolonial, anti-racist, and political lens. She understands sustainability as a collective and emancipatory practice. She promotes new narratives through clothing-making, weaving community, and fostering fairer and more responsible modes of production.

Anisa Matthews is a textile artist and researcher who explores natural dyes and draping as ancestral archives of knowledge, resistance, and care. She draws on Black feminist traditions as embodied research. As a fanzine artist, she builds bridges between cosmological and earthly knowledge, rejecting the divisions between the academic and the spiritual. Her work seeks to repair epistemicide by documenting and studying the ingenuity of Black and Indigenous women across time and the diaspora.

These workshops are part of Sofia Archer’s research project “Bon bagay” supported by one of the Barcelona CREA – La Escocesa 2026 Artist-in-Residence Grants.

If you have any needs or questions regarding the accessibility of this activity, please visit our page on “access to La Escocesa” by clicking here.