The second workshop built directly on outcomes from the first, held in Kautokeino, Norway earlier in 2025 (see Connecting with Lands, Terrain, and Materials \u2013 Supporting Localities<\/a>). At that gathering, participants collectively drafted Map V1: a visual cosmology of the network’s shared concepts and values. Rather than treating this map as a finished product, the network understood it as an open substrate: something to be returned to, amended, and inhabited through practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the second workshop, Map V1 was printed on fabric (figure 1). It would become both surface and prompt, a foundation onto which new knowledge could be stitched, literally and conceptually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Indigenous Leadership and self-determination in research<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Running through both days was a sustained reflection on three interlocking focuses for capacity building in research skills of this workshop: Indigenous leadership and self-determination in research projects; research infrastructures for arts, crafts, and knowledge-through-making; and the challenge of resisting cultural appropriation in cross-cultural collaborative settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Central to these discussions was a critical examination of how research institutions \u2014 universities in particular \u2014 relate to the communities whose knowledge they engage with. Who receives credit for knowledge production? Whose infrastructures are strengthened, and whose are bypassed? The network approached these not as abstract questions but as live problems shaping the conditions of the workshop and network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From this reflection, participants identified three foundational and interlocking principles (figure 2) for ethical, self-determined knowledge production:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1) Knowledge acknowledgement.<\/strong> Recognising the specific origins and holders of knowledge systems brought into the collaborative space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 2) Capacity building in knowledge production. <\/strong>Strengthening the conditions under which communities can produce and circulate knowledge on their own terms. Focused on supporting independence and self-determination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3) Avoiding intermediaries. <\/strong>Ensuring knowledge bearers maintain direct authorship and agency rather than being filtered through external actors. Inciting collaboration between indigenous communities, focusing on their strengths and struggles, and problematizing collaboration in the network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n These principles were then used to problematize and extend the concepts and ideas already present in Map V1, giving the making activities that followed a critical and reflective foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Knowing through making: practice of dyeing with plants from different territories<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Both workshop days opened with presentations by network participants and invited guest speakers from Peru and Colombia. These presentations grounded the subsequent making activities in the specific knowledge traditions they drew upon establishing context before the hands began their work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The core making practice of the workshop was the dyeing of yarn using pigment derived from Bixa orellana<\/em> seeds, known in Brazil and Ecuador Amazonian contexts as achiote, annatto or urucum, and Viburnum known as Pelotillo in<\/em> Sibudoy, Colombian Amazon (figure 3)and blueberries from Finland. This choice was not incidental. The use of territory-based dyes and colours served as an entry point into exploring how visual systems embedded in textiles can carry, remember, and transmit knowledge within and across communities. Global South\u2013North dialogue and knowing-through-making, facilitated by Amazonian and Sami knowledge bearers and local designers, was incited to support what Hagelin (Colonial Continuity in Finland: Cultural Appropriation of S\u00e1mi Design<\/a>) notes as knowledge-through-making and resisting cultural appropriation . <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The dyed threads were then used to embroider the fabric map, with participants adding stitched text and imagery derived from the dye itself (figure 4). This created a layered, multisensory artifact: a map of ideas that was simultaneously a record of embodied process, a bearer of territorial knowledge, and a collective act of meaning-making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Map V2: A Cosmology in thread<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n During the workshop and map making, participants reflected on the unexpected ways connection and meaning-making can happen across language barriers \u2014 through images, artefacts, and shared presence. One of our network members, Hanna M\u00e1ret Outakoski, noted that even without a common language, conversations revealed deep commonalities between Sami and Amazonian knowledge traditions, including shared questions about how symbols from sacred or ancestral contexts should (and should not) travel. The importance of Indigenous voices remaining present to guide those decisions was underscored as central to developing respectful academic exchanges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the close of the second day, the network had produced Map V2: an embroidered, and stitched elaboration of the original fabric map (figure 5) using dyed threads. In it, the concepts and values collectively agreed upon in Kautokeino have been given material form: rendered in the ochres and rusts of achiote, held in the weave of yarn, made tangible through accumulated hours of collaborative labour. After the workshop, the map was shown on an open exhibition at Aalto University showcasing the final product (more on this here NordForsk note on MAST network work<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Figure 5. Workshop 2 outcome: Map V2: a threaded cosmology.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The map is not a summary. It is an argument: that knowledge is made as much as it is spoken, and that the conditions of its making matter as deeply as its content.<\/em><\/strong> <\/em> It will continue to travel with the MAST Network as both documentation and provocation, gathering new stitches as the network’s inquiry deepens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Second MAST Network Workshop. Aalto University, Finland, 2025 At the second MAST Network workshop, participants didn’t just discuss knowledge, they dyed it, stitched it, and pressed it into fabric. This is a report from two days of making, arguing, and building something together. Building on Kautokeino: Map V1 as a living document The second workshop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3500,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-workshops"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3500"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions\/292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.aalto.fi\/mast\/files\/2026\/04\/image.png\")
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