Black Material Geographies - Episode 10

Imagining Regional Fiber Initiatives

In the final episode of Black Material Geographies, Teju Adisa Farrar continues her conversations with

• Tameka Peoples, founder of Seed 2 Shirt

• Bailey Rose, founder of the Tailors Union

Rebecca Burgess, Executive Director of Fibershed

• Building Fibersheds to Rebuild a Thoughtful Textile Culture

• Bailey discusses the challenges local and individual designers face in the age of fast fashion

• Learn about Fibershed and their efforts to rebuild textile culture and have larger conversations about the history of ecology, politics, and colonialism that surround textiles from founder, Rebecca Burgess.

• Fibershed believes creating regional fiber systems can support sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, while establishing healthy ecosystems and reinvigorating textile cultures and work with brands to analyze how they create a manufacturing process that works for them.

• Creating regional fiber initiatives requires a mindset change as well as removing the convenience of over consumption. We learn that there are also neo-liberal policies that make it difficult to create these initiatives.

• Tameka Peoples shares her goal of being an all black supply chain for Seed 2 Shirt, but also focusing on the steps to make this manufacturing chain a regional fiber shed, including growing and cleaning the cotton .

• Rebecca explains one of the technical issues of rebuilding textile culture in California is the mass industry’s goal of having cheap and exploited labor and calls for investing in manufacturing systems to decentralize the industry.

• Teju closes the final episode with the final wind down of the season and reminds us that every industry has the opportunity to transform towards genuine sustainability and how we also make choices everyday that design the future.