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Siviwe James Presents Vernacular Vocabularies of Sustainability ; A digital Presentation.

This contribution reflects on sustainability as something already embedded in everyday domestic life. It begins from the understanding that practices of keeping, repairing, reusing, and passing things on are not new responses to contemporary crisis, but forms of knowledge that have long existed within the home. In this work, sustainability is approached not as a concept waiting to be introduced, but as a lived practice with memory, context, and history. At the centre of Vernacular Vocabularies is the domestic archive, the ordinary objects and systems through which continuity is held over time. The sewing box, the kist, and the reused container are not framed as minor or incidental objects. They are treated as records of care, resourcefulness, and survival. They hold evidence of how value is extended, how materials remain in circulation, and how knowledge is carried through habit and repetition across generations. The presentation itself takes the form of a reflection. It is not driven by spectacle or presentation, but by thought, language, and lived reference. What it offers is a way of seeing domestic practice as a site of cultural knowledge. It asks what it means to recognise these everyday acts on their own terms, and why it matters to name them from within, rather than only after they have been translated through external frameworks. Within the context of Woven Threads VII: CRAFTED, this sits clearly within the programme’s focus on method, material understanding, and systems of continuity. Vernacular Vocabularies expands this conversation by locating sustainability within the home, within memory, and within inherited forms of use that have long sustained communities without always being acknowledged as such. What this contribution leaves with the viewer is a shift in language and attention. It asks us to see domestic practice not as background, but as knowledge. Not as informal habit, but as a sustained way of living with materials. And not as something to b