my Mothers
(2025)
author(s): Timour Bonin
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
This thesis explores the interwoven relationships between women, the textile arts, and its heritage, through a personal familial lens. Beginning with the question of the importance textile-making has held in our lives, I investigate whether engaging in crafting practices can reconnect us with tradition and allow us to re-root ourselves in the lives of our ancestors.
Drawing from both historical context and intimate family stories, I trace the lineage of textile practices among the women in my family - my Mothers. These include my mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, whose experiences with sewing, knitting, crocheting, and weaving shaped their identities and daily lives.
For many of them, textile-making was an act born of necessity, a survival skill often dismissed as “women’s work” within a patriarchal framework. For me, it is a conscious act and a choice - an exploration, a reclamation, and a form of personal and cultural healing.
Through self-taught practice and reflection, I came to realise how textile traditions carry knowledge, strength, and connection across generations. My research, grounded in both historical analysis and storytelling, shows how making can become a language of remembrance and resistance, a way to bridge fragmented identity and reclaim belonging.
In honouring the textile legacies of the women who came before me, I have tied myself into their story, not by romanticising their struggles, but to acknowledge their creativity and resilience. With each thread, I reconnect to a maternal lineage that continues to live through my hands.
A glimpse of the past (my Mothers' appendix)
(2025)
author(s): Timour Bonin
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
This appendix is comprised of a small collection of photos that can be examined alongside the thesis 'my Mothers'.
We Shared A Belly Podcast
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Lakisha Apostel
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'We shared a belly' is a intimate podcast which explores displacement from the perspective of Lakisha Apostel, a person of African descent who grew up on Curaçao. The prevalent presence of displacement within her life and art practice has led her to make this podcast as she concludes her Bachelors at The Royal Academy of The Hague.
This podcast consist of five episodes, each one of them tackle different questions and topics surrounding displacement, origin and the rejection origin. The content moves between the personal and collective with help of authors such as Édouard Glissant and Toni Morrison. One can view the 'We shared a belly' podcast as a precipice from which one can jump into a myriad of different of topics, questions or thoughts surrounding displacement. This podcast is available on the Research Catalogue and Soundcloud.
