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UM HIR BREAKING

Vol 30/2015

PUA KUMBU WEAVING PROJECT SELECTED AS MALAYSIAN BEST PRACTICEAT EUROPEAN PROJECT, SUSY.29 October 2015

HIR congratulates Dr. Welyne Jeffrey Jehom from the Department of Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, for having her HIR-funded Pua Kumbu Weaving Industry Project selected as Social and Solidarity Economy Best Practice for Malaysia by Sustainable and Solidarity Economy (SUSY).

Human Resources Without Borders (HRWB), an NGO repre-senting France in a consortium of 23 countries, is collaborat-ing with Dr. Welyne Jeffrey Jehom within the framework of a European project SUSY. The mission of the project is to contribute a coherent and comprehensive response to the universal challenges of poverty eradication and sustainable development, ensuring a ‘Decent Life for all by 2030’.

The SUSY project is a network of 26 associations in 23 European countries enhancing the competences of local actors engaged in the social and solidarity economy. In doing so, its strategic goal is to support a new paradigm of economic development in order to fight poverty and to disseminate an equitable and sustainable way of living.

Headed by Martine Combemale, the director of HRWB, the project covers four French departments (Languedoc Roussil-lon, Midi-Pyrénées, Aquitaine andÎlede France) and Malay-sia. The project has to nominate one social and solidarity economy example of best practice per territory and the pua kumbu weaving industry project led by Dr. Welyne has been selected as a representative of Malaysian best practice. The community engagement of the pua kumbu weaving project has striven to bring the pua kumbu cloth made by the Iban women weavers in Kapit, Sarawak, to new market platforms. The purpose is to enhance indigenous knowledge in empowering and uplifting the livelihoods of these women and their community.

The poly-sensory “Textile Tales of Pua Kumbu” exhibition, in collaboration with the former director of the Centre for Creative Content and Digital Innovation (CCCDI), Professor Harold Thwaites, held in June 2015 at the UM Art Gallery, was one of the strategies to stimulate public awareness of the history of pua kumbu, its production processes and its final products.

The ongoing documentation of pua kumbu designs and motifs is being conducted through collective memory narra-tives of the pua kumbu, combining the thoughts, experi-ence and memories of master weavers and the others from Kapit and different regions of Sarawak. This engagement has brought back many pua kumbu designs that had not been woven for the past half century.

Said Dr. Welyne ”The restoration and conservation of pua kumbu designs and motifs aim to accumulate as many possible unique styles and methods. This, in turn, has two further benefits. First, it helps create an indigenous knowledge database that improvescapacity building. And second, it enables commercialisation possibilities for pua kumbu, based on a ‘fair share’ concept of income for the weavers. Both these factors have been crucial criteria in the selection of this project as an example of best practice”.

The conservation methods employed by the project have also attracted the attention of the Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program (SEASREAP). Dr. Welyne was invited to present her work in Manila, the Philippines, in August 2015 for a research and publication project on Heritage Conservation Policies and Methods in Southeast Asia: Issues and Responses.

According to Dr. Welyne, the next step is to prepare a docu-mentary film about the pua kumbu weaving industry. This will include stake holders’ interviews and a narrative of the lives of the weavers of Kapit, Sarawak. Adèle Rivet, HRWB project manager, and Charles Gay, aUS-based film producer will travel to Malaysia in November 2015 to gather visual images for the film, assisted by Dr. Welyne. This documentary will be presented at different European events in 2016.

In addition, as part of the SUSY project, Dr. Welyne has also been selected to participate in a 2016 speaking tour of France. She will be travelling for 16 days around the four French departments in order to present key goals and findings of the pua kumbu weaving industry project.

Photo: Dr. Welyne Jeffrey Jehom with Adèle Rivet (middle), project manager of HRWB, in a meeting at Tenaganita.

LinksHRWB: www.rhsansfrontieres.org/en/HRWB onSUSY project: http://www.rhsansfrontieres.org/fr/activites/nos-projets/projet-europeen.htmlSUSY: http://www.solidarityeconomy.eu/Charles Gay documentary: https://vimeo.com/77293466