Students from Shankar and MTSIFA attending the Backcloth Collaborative Workshop 23rd-30th September 2024
A group of students and faculty from Israel’s Shankar College of Design, Technology, and Engineering together with their hosts, the Margaret Trowel School of Industrial and Fine Art (MTSIFA) in the College of Engineering, Design, Art, and Technology Makerere University are undergoing a Bark-Cloth Collaborative training workshop from the 23rd to 30th September 2024.
The training, which is one of the activities in the Shankar MTSIFA collaboration will expose students to the Backcloth fabric. It has been organized by Cocudi, the art academy exchange, where staff, and students from the two institutions meet and study together, exchanging knowledge and information.
‘It is so exciting for the students to come here and interact with their counterparts from Uganda. For most of them, this is their first time in Africa so coming here to see Indigenous traditional knowledge is quite exciting given that back home, their studies are technology-focused, observed Tamar Dekel, Founder and Co-Director of COCUDI center. She said the interaction, the third of its kind since 2021 involving people from different backgrounds was aimed at bringing new innovative ways of designing and exploring making new designs from textiles and different types of materials.
Mr. Donald Nantagya, while welcoming the team to MTSIFA on behalf of the Principal Investigator Dr. VennyNakazibweexplained that the backcloth which has several colors is obtained from the Mutuba tree also known as FicusNatalensis. However, there were other trees from which the fabric wasobtained. He said as part of the training, the participants were scheduled to travel to Masaka to gain the practical skill of how to get the backcloth from the tree.
He further explained the traditional usage of the backcloth in Uganda in the works of art and the attributes given to the fabric about burying the dead, as well as other traditional cultural practices like marriage and traditional worship. He said because of that, there were some biases even locally, associated with the use of backcloth and that the training was one of the ways of ensuring that the fabric is made popular by exposing the students to issues like how back cloth relates to the bodies, the cloth, and other materials used in textile work. We dream of the day when it will be a quick piece of fabric that can be used by all, he said, and that the training and partnership with Shankar was a great opportunity to revive the backcloth.
The faculty from MTSIFA included Dr. Sarah Nakisanze, Donald Nantagya, Angela Babirye, and Esther NdagireKavuma. From Shankar, the team was comprised of MickyKeidar and ShiraShoval.