Textile Culture Net (TCN) consists of four textile institutions: TextielMuseum in Tilburg (The Netherlands), Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź (Poland), Lottozero in Prato (Italy) and CHAT – Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textiles in Hong Kong, who share the common ambition to develop new curatorial practices, engage younger and more diverse audiences and collaborate internationally. For their fourth edition, the network received support by the Creative Europe program for 2023/2024.
Born informally and spontaneously in spring 2020 against the backdrop of the global pandemic, the four institutions joined forces to conceive what would become a long-running experimental collaboration, spanning a series of online exhibitions and exchanging of ideas, methodologies and skills beyond geographical boundaries. All the partners are institutions working on the cutting edge between art, design, fashion, urban regeneration, maker culture and sustainability.
TCN’s fourth edition for 2023/2024 is co-funded by the European Union, within the framework of the prestigious Creative Europe program, thus giving the network a greater foundation and structure through the consolidation of relations between the institutions, the expansion and strengthening of a series of collective activities, and the possibility of greater visibility and dissemination of the outputs resulting from the project.
Being the first collaboration of its kind in the fields of textile art and design, TCN represents a new concept of international collaboration between small and medium scale institutions and art centres to become more inclusive, sustainable, efficient, and at the same time, dynamic and powerful.
Using the realm of the digital as a dissemination platform, the network intends to develop new curatorial practices, offering space to a diverse palette of cultural perspectives, as well as ways to present, collect and facilitate the making of textile art and design.
TCN’s online programs are published on the Instagram accounts of the institutions and connected by the hashtag #TextileCultureNet. The exhibitions program will start in September 2023. The digital format, a medium used for co-designing and co-curating exhibitions by the network’s team of curators and guest-curators (chosen on the basis of their contribution in terms of cultural and gender diversity), possesses the ability to react quickly to the accelerated rhythm of contemporary society. In this way, the project takes on the characteristics of a curatorial laboratory of cultural diversity, capable of experimenting and elaborating new perspectives and points of view in the fields of art and textile design, aspiring to create an immediate and effective communication with the audience.
The existence of the network will also be strengthened through a publication which aims to collect the content of the online exhibitions. Realized in both printed and digital format, it will be designed by award winning design office Studio Mut and launched in June 2024, during a public event held at Lottozero in Prato.
TCN has been mentioned by CIMAM – the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art, among the ‘Outstanding Museum Practices in a Time of Global Crises’, during the initial phase of the pandemic.
