POA Opening Keynotes: Diamantina Arcoiris & Hira Nabi

The POA Opening Keynotes focus on self-care and our sustainable relationship with nature – Redesigning Ourselves with fashion designer Diamantina Arcoiris (Bogotá) and How to Love a Tree by filmmaker and visual artist Hira Nabi (Lahore/Amsterdam).

Learn more about the Fellows here.

Redesigning Ourselves by Diamantina Arcoiris

Drawing on therapeutic aspects of creativity and creative production, fashion designer Diamantina Arcoiris empowers marginalised communities to explore alternative possibilities and ‘redesign’ their lives. For her keynote Redesigning Ourselves, 72-13 is transformed into a fashion atelier infusing it with elements of Diamantina’s creative workshop located in the red light district of Bogotá. The workshop is a potently regenerative and transformative space: an educational centre, a flexible activity space as well as a refuge for the community of drug users, the homeless, and sex workers she works with. Over the years the creative workshop has become a fashion house producing socially responsible and sustainable fashion brand Amor Real. In the Singapore atelier, Diamantina curates a selection of embroidered haute couture, streetwear and blankets crafted by these vulnerable groups. Each embroidered garment and material tells a story of the process of social rehabilitation, emotional healing, and personal growth.

How to love a tree by Hira Nabi

In her lecture performance How to Love a Tree, Hira Nabi will weave together narratives from wooded landscapes, misty mountain sides, the ghosts of extraction and British imperialism, inviting the audience into forest time and inhabiting multiple temporalities at once. How to love a tree (2019 – ongoing) is a long-term project thinking with and about trees, disappearance, extinctions, extraction, love, care, and life and decay. The project includes moving images, audio, text, performance, printmaking, and rubbings, documenting the former colonial stations, now tourist resort towns in the blue pine forests of Murree and the Galiyat region of Pakistan. The project examines the through-line of extraction from colonial extractivist policies to an infrastructure of tourism, modernity that brings destruction with its arrival, and leaves behind extinction in its wake. Within the project, she asks, ‘What does disappearance look like? What traces does it leave behind? What is the texture of rot, debris and ruins?’