Guizhou Project, ATLAS: the bridge between tradition and contemporary

Art&Craft / 16 Feb 2018 / ATLAS

ATLAS, a multi-disciplinary design studio based in Beijing, has three designers from the US and Taiwan. The designers have a shared interest in culture, history, and place, which leads them to mine various contexts for unexpected stories, details, or overlooked materials and techniques.

Driven by this interest, ATLAS has been working in Guizhou for the past two years. Guizhou is a mountainous region home to a number of cultural groups, and has a strong sense of place with its architecture, agriculture, food, story, song, and cloth woven into the land. Although Guizhou has been falling behind in the rapid development of China, it’s starting to catch up today. However, this moment of change also brings further erosion to its traditional cultures and disruption in the flow of knowledge from generation to generation.

Dali Pillow

ATLAS and the Global Heritage Fund* have partnered together to initiate a social enterprise project focused on Dali village. The project helps the women of Dali village who possess a wide variety of textile skills realize the value of these skills beyond the borders of the village. It first designed a few simple pillows with the traditional hand-woven and naturally dyed “Dali Stripe” cloth, and then created a number of other designs as the women have become more comfortable adapting their skills to contemporary design.

Discussing the new quilt design

Exhibition of the Dali Pillow on at Beijing Design Week 2016

The project is now growing to incorporate other craftsmen. In collaboration with local carpenters, who are skilled at traditional building techniques and have deep knowledge of local forestry, ATLAS and GHF is designing a new building in Dali, which will house a new textile center in the village for the women to gather and have space to grow the project.

Local craftsmen

Terrain

ATLAS Terrain, Circle Pillow

For Terrain, ATLAS imagined Dong cloth as an encyclopaedia of plants, minerals, and land. In this series of textiles, rare and time-intensive cloths- including the rain-bleached cloth, the indigo cloths, and the lichen cloth-are used to craft artefacts that carry the story of place.

In Guizhou, ATLAS has been working with a local co-op* that employs over 200 weavers and artisans-skilled at a breadth of textile techniques. The widerange of unique fabrics (rain cloth, glossy cloth, batik) form the basis of the Terrain series and allow for experimentation and play in the development of new design.

Handwoven cloth hung for natural bleaching in the sun.

*The Global Heritage Fund is an international not-for-profit dedicated to preserving culture.
*The Shepard‘s Family Textile Co-op is based in Rongjiang, Guizhou. It is dedicated to the research and development of Dong textiles.