By Maxwell Wilkens
In a country wrought with political turmoil, Belarusian women have been using embroidery and textile-inspired digital artwork as a means of protest, says Sasha Razor, a Belarus native and international activist.
“Weaving, in Belarusian folklore, is a spiritual practice. It's something to regulate your emotions and to connect to something larger,” she told a UC Santa Barbara audience.
Razor presented an afternoon colloquium at UCSB last week where she discussed the rise in Belarusian feminist craftivism and her latest exhibition, “The Code of Presence: Belarusian Protest Embroideries and Textile Patterns.” Razor’s research explores Belarusian and Ukrainian culture, Russophone immigration to California, and the art of contemporary activism.
Sasha Razor, Belarus native, scholar, and activist, spoke to a crowd of students, professors, and members of the Santa Barbara community on textile and digital art protest by Belarusians.
The event was hosted by the Film and Media Studies department and was moderated by department chair Peter Bloom. Razor, who did her Ph.D. in Slavic Studies at UCLA, will be teaching an undergraduate course on Russian Soviet Cinema and War this winter at UCSB.
Belarus has a rich history of using art to strengthen communities, Razor said. During World War II, women in Belarusian villages used to participate in a “protection ritual” where they would meet from dawn until dusk and weave an enormous piece of fabric together. They would then display this work in places of worship and other public spaces. In the wake of the Coronavirus, this ritual, which was thought by scholars to be a dead practice, made a resurgence.
Razor took inspiration from this ritual in her own activist curatorial work, explaining that textiles and embroideries are the perfect medium to ground her exhibition in local history and to “fight like a girl.” Her latest exhibition, focused on the women-led uprising of 2020, includes 12 mixed-medium textile projects created by Belarusian natives.
“I’m mainly interested in practice-based research and participatory art,” Razor said. “I really dislike how Western scholars just grab some content, write about it, make a lot of contextualizations, and then the artist sometimes doesn’t even know that this work was taken and published.”
Razor also said a transition to digital mediums has helped activist artists living under oppressive regimes, who are often afraid to share their work. “The types of people in jail—it's like your colleagues and friends,” Razor said.
Websites like Cultprotest.me and antiwarcoalition.art have paved new roads for people of these countries to anonymously share their work beyond the borders of the nation, while digital textile artists like Rufina Bazlova have gone viral on social media.
“Run From The Gun,” a digital textile-inspired work by Belarusian artist Rufina Bazlova.
Dozens of students, professors, and members of the Santa Barbara community attended the colloquium. “As of today, Belarusian language and culture is not part of any U.S. university. We do feel a bit invisible, so, to me, this is a very special occurrence,” Razor said.
Maxwell Wilkens is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication and Music Studies. He is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.