17 AUG 2026 (MON) 14:35 - 15:05

Geographies of Making-in-Place: Artisan encounters and translocal knowledge across space

Miss TSANG See Long Sharon    

( Supervisor: Prof Ben Gerlofs )

Abstract:

Craft begins with somatic encounters: hands meeting fibre, tools responding to pressure, bodies adjusting to climate, terrain, and material resistance. Wool behaves differently in dry mountain air than in coastal humidity; dyes shift with minerals in water; techniques evolve through generations of living with particular landscapes and resources. Craft practices are therefore never detached from geography. They develop through ongoing engagements with environments, materials, rhythms of everyday life, and the social worlds where making takes place. To make is also to dwell, to adapt, to create, and to learn through place.

These relationships are becoming more mobile, with artisans now moving across regions and countries through residencies, workshops, festivals, exchange programs, and creative tourism that link distant craft communities. Techniques and ideas travel with them, and artisans often face unfamiliar landscapes, new working conditions, and different material sensibilities through direct interactions and collaborations with other makers. These encounters prompt broader geographical questions: What happens when place-based practices come together? How do artisans adapt and negotiate new environments through craft? And how does geography actively influence the making process?

This research addresses these questions through the lens of artisan-to-artisan exchange in creative tourism. Unlike many tourism encounters structured around service and consumption, these interactions are grounded in shared practices of making. Artisans learn by watching, touching, demonstrating, improvising, and working alongside one another. Knowledge emerges not only through verbal explanation but also through gestures, rhythms, material experimentation, and sustained co-presence. In this context, geography is not simply observed; it is handled, inhabited, and negotiated through practice. Focusing on textile exchange tours and programmes in India, Mexico, and Spain, this project examines how practices of making-in-place may be shaped by translocality. Drawing on human geography, anthropology, and craft studies, it asks what making reveals about the continual production of knowledge, place, and social relations through travel and material engagement in an interconnected world.