Sobia Ahmad

A Call for Gathering

2022-present
Slowness, weaving, food, and conversations 

​

In a time of obsessive productivity and institutionalized politics of disconnection, how do we gather with each other, create spaces for storytelling, knowledge exchange, and spiritual nourishment? Over food and slow weaving, I invite small groups to gather, reflect, and share. Through this project, I am interested in proposing tactility and slowness as an ethos for engaging with our inner lives and experiencing various spiritual dimensions of social engagement. Drawing on the power of quotidian ways of learning, these gatherings are invitations for co-creating situations in which our intuition, embodied knowledge, and collective improvisational rituals can function as alternative ways of knowledge generation. 

 

The project is inspired by a charpai, a wooden structure with a woven webbing. The charpai was the center of life in the courtyard of my childhood home in Pakistan. It was a surface for cleaning rice and drying chillies, resting, hosting, and many more everyday domestic needs. As a child, I observed my grandmother and aunts weaving it together. I see this object and the collaborative nature of the weaving process as a powerful metaphor for interconnectedness. While the materials and aesthetics draw on my familial and cultural histories, the overall themes address the politics of rest and labor, global feminist histories of craft and DIY ethos, and nonwestern intellectual and spiritual lexicons. The intention of this work is not to recreate a functional furniture object in a different cultural context, but to extend the metaphors embedded within the process of collective weaving. The object thus becomes a documentation of the various experiences that it facilitated—a vessel that holds the relationships, conversations, stories, and knowledge shared around it.

​