GREEN WEAVING CENTER
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Bhutan: Weaving the Songs of Endangered Birds
In 2025, ATW80F collaborated with the Bhutan Youth Development Fund’s Green Weaving Center to explore how textiles can become a medium for biodiversity storytelling. Together, we worked on developing new textile designs and weaves that connect traditional craft with ecological conservation.
Working alongside Master Weaver Aum Wangmo, Green Weaving Center Director Aum Karma Dema, and RADA Coordinator Tshering Choden, the collaboration brought together artisans, conservationists, and designers around a shared question: Can fabric help us listen more deeply to the living world?
A key partner in the project was Dr. Sherub—widely known as “Bird Sherub”—Bhutan’s foremost ornithologist and one of the Himalaya’s leading voices for biodiversity conservation. Dr. Sherub provided sonograms of some of Bhutan’s most iconic and endangered birds, including the wintering Black-necked Crane, the sacred Common Raven often known as Bhutan’s Royal Raven, and the critically endangered White-bellied Heron—one of the world’s rarest birds, with only around sixty individuals remaining globally, roughly half of them in Bhutan.
Working with textile artisan Ellen Rock, these acoustic signatures were transformed into woven patterns. The birds’ songs became visual structures—translated into thread through handweaving—creating a new form of bioacoustic textile.
Each scarf is accompanied by a QR code that allows the wearer to hear the original bird calls, connecting sound, story, and cloth. The result is more than a textile: it is an invitation to wear the voices of endangered species and to experience biodiversity not as an abstract concept, but as something intimate, sensory, and alive.
