'Nanga: Future Textile Heritages' with Sunny Dolat

What does the lack of a textile heritage mean for a people? Does Kenya have a truly indigenous textile? The masai shuka, can be traced back to Scottish (tartan), the khanga to the Portugese (lenco) and the kikoy to the Omani. Nanga is a project by Sunny Dolat of The Nest Collective exploring textiles as a tether, through which a people are anchored in their cultural heritage. In interrogating Kenya's textile history, the project explores the connection between the country's textile history and the country's identity crisis. The project looks at traditional African textile histories and material cultures as a base, with the ambition of developing ritual textiles, motif templates to create new Kenyan and African printed textiles, and sustainable textiles.

Sunny Dolat is an independent curator, cultural producer and creative director, and one of the founding members of The Nest Collective. Sunny centres his practice in making unapologetic statements about the beauty and dignity of black skin through works such as When We Are/When We Are Not and the fashion book Not African Enough, a voyage into contemporary Kenyan fashion and exploration of wider issues regarding Africa's place in global cultural debate and dialogues.

Read an interview with Sunny Dolat in Tangaza Magazine (30 November 2020).

Our House, your Home is an experimental program of exchange based on hospitality, inviting international organisations in a mutual learning process, sharing ideas and practices.. This month we present Material Languages, a project by The Nest Collective, a multidisciplinary group from Nairobi - with whom we have been collaborating over the past year in an online, hybrid co-learning experience.

This project is supported by Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, Mondriaan Fund and the City of The Hague.