Rivers’ Thread (নদীর সুতা)

Title
River’s Threads
Medium
Embroidery with jute threads died with indigo on discarded saris
Date
2026

« Les formes et les contours des bassins fluviaux définissent des lieux et des relations«  (The forms and contours of river basins define places and relationships)

— Giuseppe Moretti, Bassins fluviaux de la conscience

« Rivers’ Threads » navigates through the narrative currents of the Bangladesh delta, where waters have sculpted the rhythms and rituals of human existence. This textile research interrogates how rivers carry cultural memory within their flow, weaving connections between territories, communities, and resources across time.

Clémence Vazard’s research unfolds through documentation: gathering water samples along riverbanks and ghats; collecting abandoned saris from Begum Bazar on the Buriganga’s shore; capturing photographs of colored fabrics trembling in reflection at the washermen’s quarter—experimentation with the territory’s resources to translate her perception of this environment during the residency.

Her explorations around jute—a fiber deeply anchored in Bangladesh’s history—seek to transmute perception of this biodegradable, resource-light material, supplanted by plastic over recent decades: from overlooked utility to an ecological treasure.

Traversing layers of perception and symbols woven into the stitched narratives of nakshi kantha—a collective women’s practice of embroidering on recycled saris, transmitted across generations—the artist explores how embroidered emotions and desires for the future nourish fertile ground for a hybrid textile language to emerge.

This language weaves relationships between riverscapes and communities moving through the delta’s metamorphosis. This artistic research gives form to a sensitive reading of an urban hydrosystem where human civilization both rises from and rewrites the rivers’ courses.

Discarded materials become symbols of regeneration, resonating with the river’s inherent resilience.

Through collaborative practice, textile becomes a confluence where ancestral wisdom and contemporary environmental awareness meet, reconnecting communities to the living voices of their waterbodies.

Dye, Drift, Desire: A Textile Fieldwork

Rivers’ Threads (নদীর সুতা), an ongoing project by Clémence Vazard developed during her Villa Swagatam residency at the Brihatta Art Foundation in Bangladesh, approaches the delta as more than a site; it becomes both archive and collaborator, unfolding through water, textile, and the embodied labor of dyeing, mending, and stitching.

Rivers in this project are not backdrop but a key methodological element. Vazard follows a five-stage process — observe, feel, connect, represent, manifest — that allows field encounters to determine what the work can become.

Brihatta Art Foundation had a key role in this research-led practice. Through local mediation, translation, and logistics, the residency opened access to sites that rarely fold into the artist’s studio.

In Dhaka, Vazard explored the crowded sari markets of Begum Bazar and the industrial edges of the Buriganga, selecting discarded garments whose stains and frayed borders already hold intimate histories of wear. She collected river water — labeling jars with names such as Buriganga and Turag — and brought these samples back to Brihatta’s studio, where dye baths, wringing, and drying translated the rivers’ chemistry into stains and gradients.

Brihatta also facilitated sustained exchanges with artisans. Working with craft practitioner Jagadish Chandra Roy, Vazard experimented with indigo and black clay, observing how vegetal tannins and mineral-rich earth generate tones that feel inseparable from riverbeds.

Alongside reclaimed saris, she traced jute — Bangladesh’s “golden fiber” — through markets and production sites, reframing a biodegradable material long displaced by plastic as an ecological proposition in a delta where projections warn that up to 17% of the land may be submerged by 2050.

Traveling through Brihatta’s network to Rajshahi and river communities near the Mohanonda and Padma, Vazard encountered domestic surfaces as vernacular cartographies: mud walls marked with alpana motifs, baskets woven from local fibers, raw cotton in traders’ sacks, and everyday techniques for making with what the landscape provides.

Central throughout is nakshi kantha, learned through close instruction from artisan Runa Begum and other embroiderers, where repeated stitches become gestures of anchoring and, at times, a form of folk magic: embroidering desires for the future into being.

By offering time, studio infrastructure, and a community of dialogue — field access, introductions, and a framework for participatory exchange — Clémence Vazard and Brihatta enabled Rivers’ Threads to emerge as a hybrid textile language: reclaimed cloth, jute, river pigments, and collaborative knowledge woven into a living record of a territory in metamorphosis.


Humaira Hossain
PhD Candidate
University of Illinois Chicago
Rivers’ Threads – a work that connects water, textile, and lived knowledge and emotions – weaving together the ways rivers quietly script cultural memory in the Bengal delta. Developed in Bangladesh during her Villa Swagatam residency at Brihatta Art Foundation, it is an ongoing project by French artist Clémence Vazard that emerges from her deep engagement with rivers, communities, and collective making.

From the beginning, the residency unfolded not as a fixed outcome, but as a process – one shaped by conversations, fieldwork, and time spent listening to people, materials, and places. Moving along the Buriganga, Padma and other river systems, the project brought together walking, gathering, dyeing, stitching, and storytelling as ways of learning.

The collected materials played a pivotal role. The discarded sarees gathered had the intimate traces of use, marking a life lived within the creases, strains and repairs. The exploration of jute, indigo, natural dyes and other river-based materials reflect the collective stories of this land. Connecting all these together, the project foregrounds sustainability not as a theme, but as a method embedded in everyday practices.

At the heart of the project is Nakshi Kantha, a practice passed down across generations of women in Bangladesh. Here, embroidery becomes more than a piece of fabric – it acts as an archive of memories and emotions. Working closely with artisan Runa Begum, Vazard learned embroidery not as technique alone, but as a way of listening to inherited gestures, rhythms, and desires embedded in fabric.

The five-stage methodology becomes the core of Vazard’s work: observe, feel, connect, represent, and manifest.

Drawing inspiration from Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, the project invited women to imagine their understanding of rivers and waterways, their desires, and translate these into a large-scale collective kantha. What emerges is not a single artwork, but a form of relationships: between makers and materials, past and present, land and water. The process embraces slowness – combining artistic intuition with community connection, historical research, ecological awareness, and collective processes.

Rivers’ Threads invites us to experience rivers as living, breathing spaces that carry our culture, our memories, and our everyday lives. It is an invitation to feel the work as a living agent of hope – one that doesn't offer a final conclusion, but a different kind of attention towards the lives of the people, the culture, and the collective spirit that it offers.

Souradeep Dasgupta,
Art Consultant and Researcher at Brihatta Art Foundation

Rivers’ Threads,

Exhibition
Rivers’ Threads, Brihatta Art Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh

‘Nodir Shuta’

Press
‘Nodir Shuta’ reflects on Bangladesh’s rivers through textile art, The Daily Star.

Rivers’ Threads,

Press
Rivers’ Threads, The Art Broadcast, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

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