Grace Dorothée Tong approaches textiles as a medium of constructing and deconstructing collective identity. Combining different weaving techniques, with elements such as ropes, dyes, fabrics, embroidery, and motifs, the textiles culminate in a collaborative methodology. Tong works together with local communities across the ten regions of her home country Cameroon to bring together different embroidery traditions. The oral cultures present during the creative process are equally important, as the group reflects on Cameroon’s postcolonial history. In its division—a devastating effect of the initial colonization by Germany and subsequent partition between France and Britain after the First World War—the collective production of these textiles and their symbols confronts inherited colonial fractures and offers a means of practising decolonization. For the exhibition Global Fascisms, a selection of Tong’s works brings the textile vocabularies and practices of resistance together, especially in the context of Cameroon with its ongoing divisions. Tong’s works act radically as a creative and civic means to open the notion of belonging. As she states: ‘I am not an artist, I am a social worker’.

Works in the exhibition: Grace Dorothée Tong and The Marking Unit, LET THE WORK SPEAK FOR ITSELF (2024), wool thread on velvet, 150 × 100 cm; Grace Dorothée Tong and The Marking Unit, Underground (2025), wool thread on velvet, 370 × 143 cm; Grace Dorothée Tong and The Marking Unit, River (2025), wool thread on velvet, 600 × 143 cm. Courtesy of the artist