adé Oh is a Afrosurrealist, sound designer, and multimedia healing artist based in Durham, North Carolina. They are a returning generation slow craft artisan and in 2014, made a lifelong commitment to cloth and tapestry weaving. In 2020, they founded dièdiè textile farm and production studio. dìẹ̀dìẹ̀ is slow, healing, earth work and a community-based textile farm and micro-mill offering seed-to-cloth education and textile products rooted in earthwise production systems. dìẹ̀dìẹ̀ is incubating a vision of eco-regional textile manufacturing that is land-based and collectively owned and operated by BIPoC folks in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. dìẹ̀dìẹ̀ provides low-carbon, raw, and processed plant-based fiber and dye materials to the Piedmont eco-region and beyond.
dìẹ̀dìẹ̀ is designed and developed as a site for relational material activism and is becoming a hybrid worker/producer cooperative business that centers regenerative land care, African+Indigenous art, spirit, cultural expression, and ecological+healing justice. Their work connects people to a global fibershed and Afro+Indigenous material reclamation movement to transform the textile industry and realign with climate through slow, bioregional, Climate Beneficial™️, and hyperlocal textile+raw material projects.
adé Oh is a prominent figure in the local creative scene, they have collaborated with institutions like Carolina Performing Arts and the Durham Arts Network.
Interview
Links
Transcript
Question: Can you tell us about yourself as an artist?
adé Oh:
I can.
Um, I am Ad Oni and I sometimes go by adé Oh. I am a multimedia experimental healing artist and my attention as a creative being is really organized around sound and textiles. I feel that all the mediums are an expression of each other and so I get a lot of satisfaction from working across mediums and seeing how one is reflected in the other. And so as a sound artist I kind of approach my work in the same way I do as a textile artist. Um, in the textile world, I’m a weaver and a natural dyer. And I’m working on slowly growing a micro milling for processing raw fiber, specifically flax and indigo, raw dyes. But as a weaver and as a sound artist, I am really interested in dynamism and finding how to tell story in the kind of African indigenous way through sound and textile. For me, sound frequencies, sound waves when they’re materialized are threads and tapestries. And so when I’m doing either, I see both in the process. So yeah, to answer that question of how I would describe myself as an artist, I really center Afro surrealism and play. And that’s really to say that in the words of one of my um teachers Suzanne Ceser um that it’s important for me to be in constant readiness for the marvelous and really taking this sort of default posture of wonder and curiosity into everything that I do.
Question: What is your introduction to textile arts?
adé Oh:
Well, I see myself as a textile. All of us are. And I’m someone that lives with eczema. And so my chronic condition has to do with my skin. Um and in the words of another teacher who is alive today, Nik Okunday kind of master indigo dire Nigerian woman. She talks about um why cloth is so important is because it’s it’s the first kind of barrier before our skin that it’s that intimate relationship that we have to stay connected to. Cloth holds so much story. It is about relationships to each other and to the land to community. oftentimes, especially in African villages where where my people come from. My people are Yoroba people. I’m one of these firstgen babies. Uh my parents were born in south uh west Nigeria. We’re part of the Yoruba diaspora. And my mom’s people are from um Ari. And Ilari is an ancient city known for weaving. Um, and I’m not I’m positive that I have family members that were weavers, but I think the process of colonization really interrupted those indigenous ways of craft specifically for my family. Those weaving traditions still remain. And so I see myself as a returning generation of um of of people that want to return to these craft relationships to the land. and um specifically rooting into the lineage that I come from of Yoruba weaving design and approach um as well as indigo practice and I think I’m really finding out how to be in right relationship with these ways and finding my particular language with indigo and with fiber and d um with fibers has been a journey. I think there’s a lot of information out there, so many resources around how to do this and how to do that. Um, and we were talking earlier, it’s really important for me to deepen my intimacy of knowing something by experimenting and um, trying things without instructions. Um, and I I believe that sort of tendency towards improvisation is something that is ancestral to my blood um to a lot of our blood of just um learning how to be in relationship with something by being in relationship with it and taking the time it takes to get to know it and also accepting that I won’t know everything in this lifetime. time I’m okay with mystery. I’m okay with what I don’t know. Um, and that actually that mystery and the not knowing feed my creative practice. Um, and I think I want for the memory of the memory of me in death to be as a dynamic creative being who really valued improvisation and playful relationship with my materials and with the communities that um that have made me who I am.
Question: What is the value of the Black community reclaiming and owning the cotton supply chain?
adé Oh:
I had to breathe for this question. I have to breathe for this question because this question is a bloody one. Because our relationship to cotton as black people, as the African diaspora is a marvelous one. It’s one that in time before time has adorned our bodies, our communities without violence but with love. And through the violent and systematic program of colonization, that relationship became bloodied, became distraught, became disconnected, became forced labor, became enslaved labor, and really really beat the love out of a relationship that is so ancient. Um, and so reclaiming our belonging to cotton, to the earthbased practices that produce it, meaning the way we take care of the land that’s growing the cotton, the way we take care of each other that are working, the land that is growing the cotton, is about bringing love back into the equation, into how we be together. And you know the value exists beyond a kind of capitalist economic framework where we’re often hearing value being something you can measure with money. It’s beyond that. The value is kind of an eternal um return to our belonging and to this planet that we belong to the land and the land wants to clothe us. The land wants to feed us. Cotton has been used for more than cloth. cotton root. Um, I have a past life of almost being a home midwife. I’ve been a birth doula for many years. Um, I decided not to take that path. But while I was on that path, learning about home midwiffery and learning about um the ways people were taking care of each other through birth and pregnancy and abortion, cottonroot is an is herbal um medicine to support people around having an abortion. And so this plant has really provided dynamic medicine to community that lives outside of these colonial medical prison industrial complexes and can’t kind of evades capture in a lot of ways. Um, so for for black people in in the contiguous US and around the world, um, reclaiming our cotton supply chain to fit our needs and to help create the livelihoods we deserve is necessary for a liberated future.
Question: What is today’s importance of creating textile art from Black grown cotton and a Black owned company?
adé Oh:
Yes, it’s about keeping the circle unbroken. And I think as a creator, I can feel the energy from the materials that I’m working with. several years ago where it became especially as I was becoming more serious curious serious and curious um about the source of my materials um and finding ways how I as an individual could um divest from capitalism as best as I can because it’s so entrenched in our everyday lives. meaning that um there’s a constant culture of profit over people, profit over the well-being of the earth, growth by any means necessary. And so it became a kind of um ethic of my creative practice that by becoming curious about the source of my materials meant that I needed to slow down enough to learn and to know. Um, and to feel because if you’re slowing down enough to feel, I can feel the difference between synthetic textiles and natural textiles. When you add the element of who is making this cloth, it is so important to know that it is the people who this cloth is originally belonging to to black people of the earth that it changes fundamentally how I relate to the work that I’m doing and that passes on to the people that receive my work. It’s an economy of relationships and energy that is necessary to undo not only to undo but to heal the wounds that an antilack capitalist economic system has forced onto our lives for generations. And so it feels like the work of returning to an original way in a modern time as best as we can and um bringing the wealth of resource um back to the people it belongs to, to the people that really built at least the US economy that we know of. Cotton is why the US is possible. And it’s through violence and murder and enslavement of black bodies that made this nation born. Um so for me this feels like deep uh repairerative healing work. Um it feels like magic. It feels cosmic. It feels necessary and it feels like liberation now.