Ubud, Bali - The Threads of Life gallery in Ubud, on Bali Island, feels more like a museum than a shop to its visitors. Masterful woven pieces, in subdued hues of red and blue, hang on the walls. Pictures nearby show the weavers whose hands made each piece, and the accompanying text relates their stories: who they are, what village they come from, what their ethnic beliefs are, how many children they have and other biographical information.
Threads of Life sells traditionally dyed and hand-woven textiles from all over Indonesia, and describes its mission as “a fair trade business that uses culture and conservation to alleviate poverty in rural Indonesia.”
Jean Howe, one of the founders of the gallery, says she wants to convey “enough information about the piece and the weaver that a buyer forms a relationship to her and her community,” instead of simply buying a beautiful textile and never knowing its backstory. Howe sees herself as a facilitator. She says she loves being present in a community of weavers and watching the weavers, predominantly women, become empowered. “Given the right tools,” she says, “they can develop themselves.”
Howe, together with husband William Ingram and two Balinese friends, I Made Maduarta and I Made Rai Artha, started Threads of Life in the early 1990s, after the Asian economic crisis hit Indonesia. At the time, Howe and Ingram were running an adventure travel company. As their tour guides took groups of foreigners to less-traveled areas within the archipelago, they noticed people selling old textiles — often unusual heirloom pieces. When the guides questioned the sellers, they heard stories of hunger and poverty, and of families forced to part with textiles they had owned for generations. Sometimes, the sellers were accepting whatever visitors were willing to pay them, and often the families were not producing new textiles of either the quality or complexity of those they were selling. The guides started to ask Howe and Ingram what could be done to help destitute families and keep traditional weaving alive throughout Indonesia.
When Howe and Ingram began to examine the issue of preserving textile traditions in Indonesia, they found it was complex and multifaceted. The art of weaving does not stand alone; it is dependent on many other factors: culture, environment, traditions, language, history and commerce. Another obstacle was that, as is still the case now, much of Indonesia lacked Internet access, telephones and even shipping or postal services, or reliable roads, so communication and distribution were major challenges to undertaking any project in remote areas.
Howe and Ingram set up Yayasan Pecinta Budaya Bebali, in 2002, a foundation to oversee the educational and conservation aspects of their work, while Threads of Life became the business side of the foundation, providing a retail outlet for the finished textiles and finding new markets within Indonesia and abroad. There is also a Threads of Life Foundation in the United States, which sells Indonesian weaving and channels income and donations back to the foundation in Bali.
“Threads of Life exists as a catalyst for people to ask questions of themselves, a participatory process,” Howe says. The Threads of Life team found that the most efficient and productive way to work with weavers was to help the women to organize themselves into independent cooperatives. Staff did not need to make as many trips to visit or train weavers, and belonging to cooperatives allowed the weavers a greater ability to support each other, wield influence in their communities, affect conservation and manage resources. One such cooperative, in Timor, has more than 1,200 weavers. Howe points out with pride that as the status and income of Timorese weavers has risen, younger Timorese are staying in their villages and asking to learn traditional weaving and patterns.
Howe says, “It is important that weavers have high prestige and be valued for the quality of their work.” She tells me that, for the artisans, the process of weaving links them to both past and future. “The ancestors gave us the process,” one weaver said, according to Howe, and it`s now up to the weavers to preserve it for future generations.
There were other issues to be tackled in the beginning, Howe says. Under the Suharto regime, weavers and dyers were not considered to be doing important work so were recruited to build roads during the dry season (weaving and dying is traditionally done in the dry season when fieldwork is light), causing the loss of years of textile generation. Younger generations of Indonesians were more interested in working in the tourism industry or migrating from rural areas to the cities, and were not interested in learning old crafts that they considered a thing of the past and which could not earn them much money. Many traditional pieces require a season, a year or longer to make, yet weavers often could not sell traditionally made pieces for more than they could get for pieces made quickly, using chemical dyes. Weaving in Indonesia was not well-documented in writing or photographs, and motifs and designs that had been handed down from mother to daughter, father to son, were often only kept in the heads of aging weavers, who were starting to die without passing on their cultural inheritance.
The main crisis now, says Howe, lies in sourcing natural dyes in Indonesia. Traditional weaving is extremely vulnerable to a lack of the plants used for dyes. Some plants are on the verge of extinction from over-harvesting and forest clearing. In recent years, students from local universities have joined forces with the foundation to study soils from different islands with a view to transplanting certain dye plants. YPBB also works to encourage cooperatives of weavers and dyers to replant local forests, so as to protect at-risk plant species.
The results that Threads of Life saw as it began to help weavers increase incomes and retain established designs were manyfold: traditional culture was being sustained and people were finding new pride and appreciation for both their heritage and their identity as artisans; women, who make up the vast majority of weavers, were being empowered both through an exchange of skills and knowledge and through having a direct income; and traditional dye plants were being rescued from obscurity and endangered status, and replanted and harvested sustainably.
Today, each YPBB field worker must make at least 15 field visits in the dry season, when weavers have the time to work at their craft and when it is possible to navigate roads and rivers to reach remote areas. During the rainy season, weavers and dyers are generally at work in the fields, and roads may be impassable. The workers stay in a village for up to three weeks, placing orders, paying for past orders and giving advances on new ones, encouraging quality control, training the weavers in marketing and organizational skills, documenting dye plant usage, sourcing markets for other local handicrafts, building relationships with the weavers and their families, and becoming more familiar with local cultural and environmental issues.
Threads of Life strives to teach weavers that the best way to raise their income is not to increase the quantity of their weaving output, but the quality of individual pieces.
The skills transfer that the foundation promotes has not all been one-sided. Howe says that many Balinese (who make up the majority of the foundation and gallery staff) are “Bali-centric.” “Sending them out to other islands has expanded their awareness of other Indonesian islands,” she says. The Balinese return with an increased respect for other cultures within the archipelago. “It`s exciting to watch their growth,” Howe says.
Threads of Life organizes interisland indigenous weavers` festivals every few years, depending on funding. The festivals began as a way to allow weavers and dyers to exchange knowledge and to network. The last gathering in 2006 brought together 96 weavers from more than 18 different ethnic groups. Howe and Ingram asked participants to envision how they wanted their communities to look in three to five years. They helped create a “public plan” so that weavers could gather again and check their progress in coming years.
The threat of losing indigenous dye plants is a major concern that the festivals also address.
The weavers were asked what obstacles they faced – they spoke of pressure to produce works more quickly, to simplify designs and use synthetic dyes, and of false dye plants being passed off as the genuine item.
Weavers told Threads of Life staff that often it is easier for them to buy commercially made cloth and resell it than to weave in the traditional way, that tourists want cheap prices and that cash crops are easier to grow than cotton. One weaver told of being pressured by the government to plant cashews instead of cotton.
Howe said that on one island, which she declined to name, weavers still make naturally dyed pieces for themselves, but use chemical dyes for the cloth they sell. “I can`t tell the difference, and neither can you,” a weaver from the island told Howe.
Bringing people of varying ethnic backgrounds together also stimulates personal growth and celebrates differences. Howe tells of taking a man who had never left his island before by ferry to a weaving festival. “I did not know the ocean was so wide,” he told her. Many of the weavers share their traditional dances and songs with weavers from other communities, and feel that the festival is also a time to celebrate their ethnic diversity.
Howe says that Threads of Life hasn`t tried hard to open new markets because of concerns about the availability of dye plants and irregular textile production. She worries that “too big a demand would push weavers over the edge.”
Her dream, she says, is to make herself and Ingram redundant, so that Threads of Life and YPBB can go on without them. The gallery, which is a member of the International Fair Trade Association certifying body, covers its overheads, including staff salaries, from sales. Neither Howe nor Ingram draw a salary, and they continue to run their travel company. Donors, including the Ford Foundation, AUSAid, People and Plants International and the World Bank, fund the foundation.
The gallery also offers classes and workshops for the public on the history, designs and traditional uses of textiles across Indonesia.
Weavers tell Threads of Life staff that they want more market access, but they also want time off from weaving to attend ceremonies. Howe says that markets need a steady availability of products and customers become impatient with delays and irregular production, something that she works hard to convey to weavers.
The success that comes to individual weavers who have worked with Threads of Life brings a mixed blessing. Howe says she notices a progressive trend with weavers: “They reach a certain level of comfort, then they don`t want to work as hard or help their neighbours get more business, so production drops off.”
One weaver, she says, who was popular with American buyers, has stopped weaving for good. The woman made large pieces that could take a year or more to finish. “She`s bought land now, and put three kids through university,” Howe says. “She`s reached her own, personal goals, and so she`s stopped weaving.” Other weavers in the same community don`t use the same motifs, so the woman`s decision to stop is a loss to the gallery, to customers, but also to the weaver`s own community, Howe says, as now no one will make those designs anymore.
Source: TheJakartaGlobe.com
Threads of Life sells traditionally dyed and hand-woven textiles from all over Indonesia, and describes its mission as “a fair trade business that uses culture and conservation to alleviate poverty in rural Indonesia.”
Jean Howe, one of the founders of the gallery, says she wants to convey “enough information about the piece and the weaver that a buyer forms a relationship to her and her community,” instead of simply buying a beautiful textile and never knowing its backstory. Howe sees herself as a facilitator. She says she loves being present in a community of weavers and watching the weavers, predominantly women, become empowered. “Given the right tools,” she says, “they can develop themselves.”
Howe, together with husband William Ingram and two Balinese friends, I Made Maduarta and I Made Rai Artha, started Threads of Life in the early 1990s, after the Asian economic crisis hit Indonesia. At the time, Howe and Ingram were running an adventure travel company. As their tour guides took groups of foreigners to less-traveled areas within the archipelago, they noticed people selling old textiles — often unusual heirloom pieces. When the guides questioned the sellers, they heard stories of hunger and poverty, and of families forced to part with textiles they had owned for generations. Sometimes, the sellers were accepting whatever visitors were willing to pay them, and often the families were not producing new textiles of either the quality or complexity of those they were selling. The guides started to ask Howe and Ingram what could be done to help destitute families and keep traditional weaving alive throughout Indonesia.
When Howe and Ingram began to examine the issue of preserving textile traditions in Indonesia, they found it was complex and multifaceted. The art of weaving does not stand alone; it is dependent on many other factors: culture, environment, traditions, language, history and commerce. Another obstacle was that, as is still the case now, much of Indonesia lacked Internet access, telephones and even shipping or postal services, or reliable roads, so communication and distribution were major challenges to undertaking any project in remote areas.
Howe and Ingram set up Yayasan Pecinta Budaya Bebali, in 2002, a foundation to oversee the educational and conservation aspects of their work, while Threads of Life became the business side of the foundation, providing a retail outlet for the finished textiles and finding new markets within Indonesia and abroad. There is also a Threads of Life Foundation in the United States, which sells Indonesian weaving and channels income and donations back to the foundation in Bali.
“Threads of Life exists as a catalyst for people to ask questions of themselves, a participatory process,” Howe says. The Threads of Life team found that the most efficient and productive way to work with weavers was to help the women to organize themselves into independent cooperatives. Staff did not need to make as many trips to visit or train weavers, and belonging to cooperatives allowed the weavers a greater ability to support each other, wield influence in their communities, affect conservation and manage resources. One such cooperative, in Timor, has more than 1,200 weavers. Howe points out with pride that as the status and income of Timorese weavers has risen, younger Timorese are staying in their villages and asking to learn traditional weaving and patterns.
Howe says, “It is important that weavers have high prestige and be valued for the quality of their work.” She tells me that, for the artisans, the process of weaving links them to both past and future. “The ancestors gave us the process,” one weaver said, according to Howe, and it`s now up to the weavers to preserve it for future generations.
There were other issues to be tackled in the beginning, Howe says. Under the Suharto regime, weavers and dyers were not considered to be doing important work so were recruited to build roads during the dry season (weaving and dying is traditionally done in the dry season when fieldwork is light), causing the loss of years of textile generation. Younger generations of Indonesians were more interested in working in the tourism industry or migrating from rural areas to the cities, and were not interested in learning old crafts that they considered a thing of the past and which could not earn them much money. Many traditional pieces require a season, a year or longer to make, yet weavers often could not sell traditionally made pieces for more than they could get for pieces made quickly, using chemical dyes. Weaving in Indonesia was not well-documented in writing or photographs, and motifs and designs that had been handed down from mother to daughter, father to son, were often only kept in the heads of aging weavers, who were starting to die without passing on their cultural inheritance.
The main crisis now, says Howe, lies in sourcing natural dyes in Indonesia. Traditional weaving is extremely vulnerable to a lack of the plants used for dyes. Some plants are on the verge of extinction from over-harvesting and forest clearing. In recent years, students from local universities have joined forces with the foundation to study soils from different islands with a view to transplanting certain dye plants. YPBB also works to encourage cooperatives of weavers and dyers to replant local forests, so as to protect at-risk plant species.
The results that Threads of Life saw as it began to help weavers increase incomes and retain established designs were manyfold: traditional culture was being sustained and people were finding new pride and appreciation for both their heritage and their identity as artisans; women, who make up the vast majority of weavers, were being empowered both through an exchange of skills and knowledge and through having a direct income; and traditional dye plants were being rescued from obscurity and endangered status, and replanted and harvested sustainably.
Today, each YPBB field worker must make at least 15 field visits in the dry season, when weavers have the time to work at their craft and when it is possible to navigate roads and rivers to reach remote areas. During the rainy season, weavers and dyers are generally at work in the fields, and roads may be impassable. The workers stay in a village for up to three weeks, placing orders, paying for past orders and giving advances on new ones, encouraging quality control, training the weavers in marketing and organizational skills, documenting dye plant usage, sourcing markets for other local handicrafts, building relationships with the weavers and their families, and becoming more familiar with local cultural and environmental issues.
Threads of Life strives to teach weavers that the best way to raise their income is not to increase the quantity of their weaving output, but the quality of individual pieces.
The skills transfer that the foundation promotes has not all been one-sided. Howe says that many Balinese (who make up the majority of the foundation and gallery staff) are “Bali-centric.” “Sending them out to other islands has expanded their awareness of other Indonesian islands,” she says. The Balinese return with an increased respect for other cultures within the archipelago. “It`s exciting to watch their growth,” Howe says.
Threads of Life organizes interisland indigenous weavers` festivals every few years, depending on funding. The festivals began as a way to allow weavers and dyers to exchange knowledge and to network. The last gathering in 2006 brought together 96 weavers from more than 18 different ethnic groups. Howe and Ingram asked participants to envision how they wanted their communities to look in three to five years. They helped create a “public plan” so that weavers could gather again and check their progress in coming years.
The threat of losing indigenous dye plants is a major concern that the festivals also address.
The weavers were asked what obstacles they faced – they spoke of pressure to produce works more quickly, to simplify designs and use synthetic dyes, and of false dye plants being passed off as the genuine item.
Weavers told Threads of Life staff that often it is easier for them to buy commercially made cloth and resell it than to weave in the traditional way, that tourists want cheap prices and that cash crops are easier to grow than cotton. One weaver told of being pressured by the government to plant cashews instead of cotton.
Howe said that on one island, which she declined to name, weavers still make naturally dyed pieces for themselves, but use chemical dyes for the cloth they sell. “I can`t tell the difference, and neither can you,” a weaver from the island told Howe.
Bringing people of varying ethnic backgrounds together also stimulates personal growth and celebrates differences. Howe tells of taking a man who had never left his island before by ferry to a weaving festival. “I did not know the ocean was so wide,” he told her. Many of the weavers share their traditional dances and songs with weavers from other communities, and feel that the festival is also a time to celebrate their ethnic diversity.
Howe says that Threads of Life hasn`t tried hard to open new markets because of concerns about the availability of dye plants and irregular textile production. She worries that “too big a demand would push weavers over the edge.”
Her dream, she says, is to make herself and Ingram redundant, so that Threads of Life and YPBB can go on without them. The gallery, which is a member of the International Fair Trade Association certifying body, covers its overheads, including staff salaries, from sales. Neither Howe nor Ingram draw a salary, and they continue to run their travel company. Donors, including the Ford Foundation, AUSAid, People and Plants International and the World Bank, fund the foundation.
The gallery also offers classes and workshops for the public on the history, designs and traditional uses of textiles across Indonesia.
Weavers tell Threads of Life staff that they want more market access, but they also want time off from weaving to attend ceremonies. Howe says that markets need a steady availability of products and customers become impatient with delays and irregular production, something that she works hard to convey to weavers.
The success that comes to individual weavers who have worked with Threads of Life brings a mixed blessing. Howe says she notices a progressive trend with weavers: “They reach a certain level of comfort, then they don`t want to work as hard or help their neighbours get more business, so production drops off.”
One weaver, she says, who was popular with American buyers, has stopped weaving for good. The woman made large pieces that could take a year or more to finish. “She`s bought land now, and put three kids through university,” Howe says. “She`s reached her own, personal goals, and so she`s stopped weaving.” Other weavers in the same community don`t use the same motifs, so the woman`s decision to stop is a loss to the gallery, to customers, but also to the weaver`s own community, Howe says, as now no one will make those designs anymore.
Source: TheJakartaGlobe.com
