Most recent exhibition
Their Past, Your Future by Dr Sue Jones
‘Their Past, Your Future’ – The Bani Hamida Weaving Project, Makawir, Jordan.
An Exhibition at the Constance Howard Centre for Textiles.
14th October - 30th November 2011
This exhibition was about conversations over time involving materials. What narratives are produced
through the relationship of people and objects?
The Bani Hamida Weaving project in Jordan began in 1985 with support from Save the Children and is
still operating as part of the Jordan River Foundation, chaired by HM Queen Rania. Over a 25 year
period the rug production has become interwoven in many, and new ways with the lives of this group of
Bedouin women.
This is a complicated narrative. The Weaving Project has been a contested and changing arena for
three generations of women – involved with external development agendas and funding requirements,
the expansions and contractions of markets for these goods, many changes in design and the
increasing technical focus of rug production. In this ebb and flow the Bani Hamida women have used their craft/artisan skills to try to fulfil their aspirations, particularly for educating their children – girls and boys.
I was drawn into this relationship at its start in 1985 as an anthropologist, working in Jordan. From 1985
I was initially a volunteer, I began a PhD at Goldsmiths in the 80s but had to abandon that with the First
Gulf war, returning to Jordan on another consultancy in 1996. I completed the PhD – Weaving an
Ethnography - in 2006 at London University. I still visit the women.
Visual materials and photographs have been very important in our relationship. For me they represent
the narrative of the project, a photographic memory of all those years and experiences we have shared
together.
I want to draw other people into this conversation - to see how it might have meaning in terms of other
peoples’ lives. Have previous generations of their own family used their artisan skills to earn money and
improve their life chances by educating their children?
We would also like people to give their reflections on the Bedouin weavers and their rugs. I will take any
comments that visitors make back to the Bani Hamida women in Jordan to discuss how others see their
lives and work – so the conversation will continue and the narrative goes on with more people
intertwined within the narrative of the Bani Hamida women and their weaving project.
Sue Jones 2011
On the opening day of the exhibition the Anthropology Department hosted a one day seminar –
‘Material Matters’,which considered the narratives produced from the relationship of people and materials
linked to a number of countries – Romania, Jordan, Mongolia, Iran, Germany, Kuwait, India, Lebanon
and Trinidad.
The Bani Hamida weaving project will be one of the contributions to a special edition of the
academic journal ‘Textiles’ in 2012/13.