Rivers’ Threads,
Exhibition
Rivers’ Threads, Brihatta Art Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Rivers’ Thread (নদীর সুতা)
« 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.