Continuing Textile Traditions and Creating Contemporary Materials: Madagascar Wild Silk and Raffia скачать в хорошем качестве

Continuing Textile Traditions and Creating Contemporary Materials: Madagascar Wild Silk and Raffia

This program was hosted by Weave A Real Peace (www.weavearealpeace.org) in February of 2026. Join WARP for our February Continuing Textile Traditions panel discussion. Madagascar is renowned as a natural and cultural wonder. Yet its contemporary wild silk and traditional raffia textiles are a well-kept secret. Rachel Kramer, Executive Director of Conservation through Poverty Alleviation International, and Lalaina Raharindimby, Lead Artisan behind the celebrated social impact enterprise, Tanana Madagascar, will tell the story of sister organizations in the United States and Madagascar that operate at the intersection of science and art. Together, they’re uplifting local farmers and artisans, keeping traditional Betsimisaraka raffia weaving techniques alive, and introducing a new form of shimmering sustainable textile sewn from the cocoons of wild rainforest silk moths. This partnership brings beauty into a complex world through conservation and social enterprise. Finally, Sarah Fee of the Royal Ontario Museum will share the cultural and artistic significance of Malagasy textiles. Panelists: A conservation leader with a passion for positive change, Rachel Kramer is the Executive Director of Conservation through Poverty Alleviation International (CPALI), a US-based 501(c)3 non-profit. CPALI’s mission is to enhance biodiversity, improve economic lives through arts-based social enterprise, and accelerate local innovations that offer potential for transformative change. Together with Sehatry ny Mpamokatra Landy Ifotony, the Organization of Wild Silk Producers in Madagascar (SEPALI Madagascar), CPALI leads a social impact enterprise that connects traditional woven raffia and contemporary wild silk textiles to fair markets. Each piece is a celebration of nature, culture, and craft. Rachel holds a Master of Environmental Science from Yale University’s School of the Environment, and a Bachelor of Arts from Brandeis University. She served three years in the Peace Corps in Madagascar and her family’s ties to the island go back the late 1960s. An accomplished artisan and designer, Lalaina Raharindimby leads the SEPALI Madagascar artisans association in Maroantsetra, facilitating the design of textiles made from wild silk and raffia. She has traveled to the United States as an ambassador for Tanana Madagascar at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe and as part of Shoppe Object’s Global Artisan Project in New York. Her designs can be found at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art shop in Washington, DC, among other locations. She is currently part of the prestigious Ibu Atelier program, and has been a WARP grantee. Sarah Fee is a very busy woman, working simultaneously in museums and academia in both the US and Canada. Her multiple roles include co-founding the Tandroy Ethnographic Museum in Berenty, Madagascar, a country she lived in for four years, exhibitions in all three countries through the Smithsonian and the ROM, where she is currently the Senior Curator of Global Fashion and Textiles. Additionally she holds academic positions in four universities (now add France to the list of countries in which she works), and other roles too numerous to fit in this space. Her textile focus is broad, beginning with spinning, dyeing, and weaving and running the gamut to the textile and dress traditions of the wider western Indian Ocean world, which embraces southern Arabia, eastern Africa and western India. She has edited and written for numerous books, journals, and catalogues, lists of which you can see on the ROM website. Thematic interests include woven and printed textiles, textile trades, cross-cultural appropriations of cloth and dress, ceremonial exchange, spinning and dye technologies, and the history of museum textile collecting.