Arts Thread

Held in April 2026, Wandering Threads was a conference-style community workshop in Oradea, Romania. Born from a collaboration between Scotland, Hungary, and Romania, the project reimagines the city’s abandoned textile mills. The event brought together designers, craftspeople, students, and locals to share personal stories about Oradea’s industrial heritage. By mapping garment origins and local supply chains, participants built generational connections while exploring how creative practices can breathe new life into forgotten spaces. This pilot sets the foundation for future workshops connecting students and professionals across borders.With this perspective in mind, the exhibition brings together several strands of material. It assembles photographic documentation and surviving artifacts of Oradea’s light industry, with particular emphasis on the textile and footwear sectors; presents the outcomes of university courses currently conducted in the city that engage with approaches oriented toward sustainable object design; and includes textile works that draw on the formal vocabulary of tradition not from an antiquarian standpoint or out of nostalgic attachment, but in order to demonstrate that what we create must also be sustained if its creation is to retain its meaning. In this sense, contemporary efforts to preserve the past appear here, too, to be directed primarily toward the future. The event ended with a pop-up exhibition that connected Oradea’s industrial history with modern sustainable design. It brought together historic photographs and local tools from the city's former textile and footwear factories, displaying them alongside contemporary work created by local university students. Rather than looking back with nostalgia, the exhibition used these traditional skills and historic materials to prompt conversations about the future. By placing past craftsmanship next to new student projects, the pop-up showed how local textile heritage can inspire new, long-term approaches to design and manufacturing in the region.