The Dutch Textielcommissie organises an annual symposium, publishing the post-prints in Studies in Textiel. This year’s symposium will take ‘Weaving Values’ as its theme and will take place on 21 November 2025 in Leiden, in cooperation with Museum De Lakenhal and the Leidse Dekens Foundation; alongside the symposium, there will be an exhibition at Leiden Art Hub. With ‘Weaving Values’ the Textielcommissie aims to connect the academic and museum fields with artists, designers and producers in textiles. In museums and art history, there is a growing interest in textiles, and a growing number of contemporary makers are focusing on textile materials and techniques. The extielcommissie believes that these two fields need each other’s knowledge and input. By putting ‘Weaving Values’ in the spotlight, the Textielcommissie hopes to stimulate and support these developments.
The upcoming Studies in Textiel (no. 19, expected date of publication summer 2026) will be devoted to the ‘Weaving Values’ theme. To add to these symposium post-prints, the Textielcommissie invites authors from academia, the museum field and the textile art world to submit a proposal for a contribution to this publication. We especially welcome students, early-career academics, and makers. Purpose of the publication is to bring together textile production and research, showing the many values that textiles can represent. Subjects to explore can be of quite varied character, e.g. aspects of the history of textiles, research into the affordances of material and technique, or textile innovations for the future.
Some suggestions for article subjects:
– contemporary weaving practice by artists active in the Low Countries
– how makers conduct research into materials and media
– values of textiles in the lives of people or groups of people
– how textiles react and adapt to their surroundings
– how to address ‘values’ and ‘meaning’ in the course of the restoration of textiles
– the value of textiles in archaeology, history and art/design history
– how to actively provide access to research into historic textiles outside museums and heritage institutions
– the relation between manual technical research and the design of textiles
– innovative techniques for textile production
As the Textielcommissie wants to explore the ‘Weaving Values’ theme as broadly as possible, subjects are not strictly limited to the above suggestions.
Articles should be between 1500 and 7000 words (with a maximum of 8 illustrations) and can submitted in English or Dutch. Abstracts (max. 500 words together with a short bio of max. 100 words) can be sent to [email protected] or one of the email addresses given below until 30 November 2025. After this date, the editors will as soon as possible inform authors which proposals have been accepted. The deadline for all final contributions is at the end of February 2026.
For more information please contact: Herman den Otter, editor-in-chief of Studies in Textiel, [email protected] or Mirjam Deckers, board member of the Textielcommissie, [email protected].
Website: www.textielcommissie.nl