VizChitra 2025

Textiles as protest, archives, and hidden histories.

Description:
We consume overwhelming amounts of data daily. Numbers around war, displacement, and conflict often feel distant and flat.
This session asks: What happens when we hold those numbers in our hands?

This workshop invites participants to respond to political realities through counted stitch embroidery. Instead of large or abstract datasets, we’ll work with a curated collection of headlines, protest slogans, censored quotes, and banned book/news excerpts drawn from open-access sources and recent political movements.

Participants will plot their designs on graph paper and then translate them into embroidery on fabric. As they slow down to hand-stitch their pieces, they’ll begin to feel the weight of the data, becoming more emotionally connected to the information.
This isn’t just about visualizing statistics, it’s about re-sensitization, holding silence, and threading resistance into fabric.

Takeaways:

1. Reimagine protest through tactile, emotional forms
   2.Translate headlines or hidden narratives into visual, stitched language
   3.Learn how textiles have archived dissent across time and cultures
   4.Leave with a handcrafted artifact that makes political stories personal

Audience:
Anyone interested in data, politics, protest, or craft as a form of resistance.
No prior experience required.

Bio
Ruby Rybin is a graphic designer and visual storyteller from NID, currently working as a Graphic Design Intern at Hero MotoCorp. She specializes in editorial design and illustration and loves turning serious things into silly things (and vice versa). Ruby thrives on collaboration, curiosity, and plenty of filter coffee. https://www.behance.net/rubyrybin

Shruti Pawar is a maker at heart and a Textile Designer from NID, currently working as a Fashion Design Intern at Peter England. As an artist and researcher, she draws inspiration from daily life and fictional worlds alike. Shruti has experience working with children and conducting workshops with them. She believes deeply in the vast potential of textiles as a medium. https://www.behance.net/shrutipawar
https://www.instagram.com/magarmucchh/

Together, they’re on a mission to make data feel less like math homework and more like a craft party. In an excessively digital world, they explore what it means to make something by hand and where handcraft stands in contemporary society.