Threads of Remembrance – Könül Rəfiyeva’s reflections on textile and HIAP Suomenlinna

Annotation 

Threads of Remembrance investigates textile as a transdisciplinary site of embodied knowledge, cultural memory, and material semiotics. Developed during a residency at HIAP on Suomenlinna, the project examines correspondences between Finnish and Azerbaijani textile practices through the lenses of slow methodology, eco-materiality, and gendered forms of labor. By situating textile within broader epistemic and spatial frameworks, the research proposes it as a critical medium for articulating cross-cultural historiographies.

Reflections on material memory, textile codes, and the island as method

When I arrived in Helsinki for my residency at HIAP, I carried with me not only research questions but a sense of a material language I had been trying to articulate for years. Textile has always been a code I return to, a soft technology of memory, a medium through which women in my culture preserved, concealed, and transmitted knowledge that could not be spoken aloud. Yet it was only on the island of Suomenlinna, surrounded by shifting winds, tidal silences, and the persistent greyness of the northern sky, that this code became legible to me in an entirely new way.

The residency unfolded as a series of encounters: with the landscape, with artists and their practices, with archives, and with forms of slowness that are rare in the South Caucasus. More importantly, it unfolded as a weaving, a gradual interlacing of stories, textures, gestures, and histories across geographic and cultural distances. My project Threads of Remembrance emerged from this interlacing. It is both a curatorial inquiry and a methodology: an attempt to understand textile not merely as a material of making but as a vessel that carries and activates memory, shaping how histories are held, softened, or allowed to breathe.

Helsinki Biennial preview: Ecology, memory, and the expanding field

During the residency, attending the preview of the Helsinki Biennial became another layer of research, expanding the conceptual framework of Threads of Remembrance. Many works in the biennial engaged with ecology, non-human agency, and the interdependence between landscape, material, and memory. The curatorial emphasis on care and relationality resonated with my own inquiries into textile as a living, breathing archive.

I was struck by how the biennial foregrounded slow, process-based practices, works that privilege duration, vulnerability, and attentiveness over spectacle. This reaffirmed my commitment to developing a curatorial language rooted in care, materiality, and cross-cultural dialogue. It also revealed how art can function as a membrane between worlds, a permeable surface where histories and ecologies intermingle, where materials absorb and transmit narratives across time.

These encounters broadened the conceptual scope of my project: textile began to appear not only as a cultural medium but as an ecological one, revealing how materials carry embedded stories about land, extraction, sustainability, and belonging.

Textile as code: Material archives and embodied knowledge

Gurama is a vernacular patchwork technique which operates as a quiet archive. It stores personal and collective histories within layers of fabric, assembling fragments of worn clothes, family textiles, and materials that have already lived other lives. Each stitch marks a gesture of care; each pattern encodes an intimate logic of repair and reuse. During my HIAP residency, I began to think of gurama not only as a craft but as a system of knowledge, a set of embodied codes that women have passed on through generations outside formal institutions.

In Helsinki, I started to recognize similar codes embedded in Finnish textile practices. Through conversations with artists and curators, I noticed that the aesthetics of Finnish textile work, its attention to abstraction, rhythm, repetition, and tactility, reflects a parallel sensibility: a deep respect for slowness, endurance, and the meditative discipline of making. These parallels did not collapse the differences between our cultures; rather, they opened a shared space where the material intelligence of textile revealed itself as a universal language of care.

My encounters extended beyond the island. Meetings at Frame Contemporary Art Finland and studio visits across the city offered further insight into how textile is approached in the Finnish context as a critical, often quietly radical language of ecology and memory. These conversations helped me situate my own research within a broader network of practices attentive to slowness, material storytelling, and embodied forms of knowing.

Textile, in this sense, became a bridge between geographies – a way of thinking that transcends borders. It is a medium that stores time. It learns from touch. It remembers.
This residency allowed me to articulate my curatorial methodology more clearly: one grounded in material research, embodied knowledge, and forms of translocal dialogue shaped by care.

Textile as feminist language: Gendered labor and embodied memory

Textile emerged for me in Helsinki not only as a material language but as a feminist one, a soft, embodied repository of knowledge shaped through generations of gendered labor. Working with gurama has always meant engaging with histories that were never written down: tacit forms of care, survival, domestic resistance, and the intimate labor of women whose contributions often remain outside institutional narratives. In dialogue with Finnish textile practices, I began to see how these “soft technologies” function as counter-archives, preserving forms of memory that conventional historiography overlooks.

The tactile intelligence embedded in stitching, mending, and assembling becomes a method of thinking, relational, intergenerational, and profoundly feminist. It is a knowledge system passed through hands rather than institutions, sustained through repetition, attunement, and care.

Through this process, I also began to articulate my own curatorial methodology more clearly, one grounded in situated knowledge, material research, and the ethics of care. Textile became not only an object of study but a tool for thinking, a way of engaging with communities and histories through embodied, slow, and attentive practice.

What grew increasingly important during the residency was understanding textile as a civic material – a medium through which personal and communal memories are preserved, shared, and reactivated. Curating, in this sense, extends beyond exhibition-making: it becomes a form of care for stories, relations, and fragile cultural ecosystems. It becomes a practice of holding, repairing, and sustaining the narratives that might otherwise fade.

The island as method: Landscape, rhythm, silence

Suomenlinna is more than the physical location of HIAP, it is an ecological and conceptual force that shapes the residency experience. The island operates as what I came to think of as a slow methodology. Its rhythms, ferry arrivals, shifting tides, sounds carried across the water, naturally resist the acceleration of contemporary cultural production. The landscape invites a temporal suspension: thinking becomes slower, deeper, more attentive.

This sensibility profoundly influenced my project. Each morning, the walk from the residence to the studio became a contemplative corridor. The greyness of the sky layered itself over the marine landscape like a textile – thin, translucent, constantly moving. The unique light of the Baltic coast cast everything in a soft, diffused palette, turning surfaces into membranes that both reveal and conceal. The island’s stone walls and moss-covered textures echoed the materials I work with in gurama: creases, folds, and the accumulated histories embedded in fabric.

In this quiet environment, I began to understand the materiality of memory not only metaphorically but physically. The island taught me that memory behaves like cloth: it stretches, folds, frays, and is repaired. It wears signs of touch. Its durability lies in its fragility.

Decentering narratives through craft knowledge and migratory cloth

Working with textile on Suomenlinna also meant engaging with broader decolonial questions. Craft, especially in non-Western contexts, carries ways of knowing that remain largely absent from dominant art-historical narratives. Through gurama and Finnish textile traditions, I encountered knowledge systems rooted in care, slowness, repetition, and repair, epistemologies that challenge extractive, linear, and institutionally sanctioned modes of producing history.

This decolonial attentiveness allowed me to approach textile as a site where marginal, fragmented, or suppressed memories continue to live. Craft practices, with their intimate scales and embodied rhythms, resist homogenizing cultural frameworks and instead offer counter-histories that recenter peripheral voices and expand our understanding of how cultural memory is shaped, held, and transmitted.

During the residency, I became increasingly aware of the migratory nature of textile itself: how fabrics cross geographies, carrying with them traces of movement, displacement, and cultural entanglement. A stitched fragment, a reused cloth, or a patchwork composition becomes a vessel for diasporic memory: adaptive, mobile, layered with lived experience. In this sense, textile embodies a form of translocal knowledge, connecting the Caspian and Nordic regions through material memory rather than fixed national narratives. It is a medium that understands movement, that absorbs and transmits histories across borders.

Taken together, these decolonial, feminist, and migratory perspectives shaped the conceptual core of my research in Helsinki. They revealed textile not simply as a material practice, but as an epistemic field – a way of sensing, remembering, and narrating histories that resist simplification.

Dialogues with artists: Resonances and divergences

One of the strongest aspects of the residency was the constellation of artists whose practices expanded the contours of my research. Through Textile Activation, Open Studios, shared meals, and informal conversations, I encountered textile-based works that approached materiality in precise yet experimental ways. Their conceptual clarity, sensitivity to ecological contexts, and understanding of craft as a political gesture enriched and challenged my own thinking.

It became increasingly clear to me that textile is not merely a medium but a method – a way of sensing, reasoning, and interpreting the world. The artists I met approached textile as a material with agency, capable of recording the tensions between personal histories and broader socio-cultural ecologies. Their works demonstrated how cloth can hold conflict, tenderness, resistance, and transformation all at once.

These dialogues played a formative role in shaping the conceptual architecture of the exhibition I am now developing in Baku, which will bring together Finnish artists and Azerbaijani gurama artisans. My aim is not to juxtapose two traditions, but to create a space of resonance, a shared field where fragility, material intelligence, and slow forms of making illuminate the connections between our textile histories.

Future echoes: From HIAP to Baku and beyond

As the project moves into its next phase, the exhibition in Baku, its conceptual grounding remains deeply tied to Helsinki. The residency did not simply accompany the work; it recalibrated its entire trajectory. It revealed a new geography of relation, where Nordic and South Caucasian textile practices can converse through their shared attention to fragility, repetition, and care.

The exhibition will attempt to articulate these connections: to create a space where fabric becomes a mediator between histories, where patchwork becomes a metaphor for cross-cultural memory, and where craft emerges as a strategy of resilience. Textile will serve not merely as a material but as a relational field, binding together the ecological, cultural, and emotional dimensions of our geographies.

HIAP provided the conditions for this research to take shape: time, landscape, community, and an intellectual ecology that honors slowness. It is a place where thinking is not rushed, where dialogue functions as a form of care, and where material practices are allowed to breathe. The development of Threads of Remembrance was also nurtured by conversations beyond Suomenlinna including exchanges facilitated through Frame Contemporary Art Finland and Saastamoinen Foundation–related programmes which expanded the project’s horizon within the Finnish art field and positioned it within a wider international context. These institutional dialogues affirmed the relevance of textile-based research across Nordic and Caucasian cultural spaces.

The residency allowed me to test a curatorial approach that operates translocally, attentive to the specificities of place yet aware of how materials, gestures, and memories circulate across borders. This method foregrounds craft as a form of knowledge capable of decentering dominant narratives and opening space for alternative historiographies.

The island becomes a method.
The textile becomes a language.
Memory becomes something we can hold.

Text: Könül Rəfiyeva