Project by Mahum Erkin
“Weaving Home” is a feminist ethnography rooted in the embodied practices of Uyghur women in East Turkistan under conditions of cultural erasure. It studies how knowledge, memory, and belonging are transmitted through rituals such as weaving and kneading, even as home is systematically dismantled through displacement and detention. From this research emerges a speculative architecture that uses these practices as both method and structure. The proposed home translates intimate acts of hand movements and bodily choreographies into spatial systems, building tectonics with thread and dough to reimagine domestic space as a regenerative process rather than a fixed object. Architectural imagination becomes a tool of resistance, reclaiming lost territory through the celebration of Uyghur identity and feminine labor. Ultimately, the female body itself is deemed as a dwelling: a living vessel of culture, memory, and continuity that endures beyond borders, systems, and violence.
