Raisa Kabir
They / Them
Manchester / United Kingdom
House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance) 2020
digital film
Weavers: Tobu Adebajo, Ayo, Laura Dajao, Kat Hawkins, June Lam, Rudy Loewe, Rukeya, Meera Shakti Osbourne
Videographer: Junia Adenike
Editor and Captions: Emilia Beatriz
Sound Editor: XANA
Raisa documented a public weaving performance created by and for, black and Indigenous people of colour, disabled, and queer participants.
The result was a geometric textile sculpture created through interdependent action and care. Raisa used the performance to create the film, House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance). The visible face masks and physical distance between participants underscores the urgency and precarious nature of support structures during a time of pandemic.
By embodying these structures of support and mutual aid, this performance asks us to consider how labour and care are connected across all bodies and borders. In doing so, House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance). underscores a key precept of disability justice that in Raisa’s words: …Is dependent on wider society believing in, and participating in, creating access for all.
Raisa Kabir is an interdisciplinary artist, weaver and writer based in London. Raisa describes themselves as a South Asian queer disabled femme. They are of Bangladeshi origin and brought up in Manchester. Through woven text/textiles, sound, video, and performance, Raisa interrogates the cultural politics of cloth, identity, textile cultures and colonial geographies. Raisa’s performances and tapestries comment on histories of transnational power, global production, migration and labour. Their textile works investigate discourses around disability, resisting function and the Queer racialised body as a living archive of collective trauma.
Raisa has held residencies and exhibited across the UK and internationally including at The Whitworth, Glasgow International, British Textile Biennial, Ford Foundation New York, CCA Glasgow, and the Centre for Craft Creativity and Design.
Top Image: Raisa Kabir, House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance). film still, 2020. Photo: Raisa Kabir