Domestic Duster Workshops

Working in collaboration with Vanessa Marr, founder of the Domestic Dusters project, we will be running a series of craftivist workshops for ten refugee and asylum-seeking women in London. These pilot workshops aim, through the eternally under-estimated craft of embroidery, to co-create an empowering toolkit for refugee women to share with their own communities. Collectively, we will employ the Domestic Dusters stitch-based methodology to explore women’s experience of displacement and homemaking, calling for their individual rights as women to be recognised. Participants will embroider their personal experiences of displacement onto a yellow duster, then build on this experience to co-design the toolkit.

This series of collaborative workshops will combine Marr’s innovative and inherently feminist approach with Makani’s mission, producing an opportunity for a group of refugee and asylum-seeking women to embrace the spirit of protest, empowerment and community through craft. This pilot project is the first step towards a larger project which will invite more refugee and asylum-seeking women to explore gendered experiences of displacement through craft, using the toolkit designed through these initial workshops.