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One of the materials that has accompanied the last years, is a yarn was spun at Telespinn in Norway from mohair raised in Telemark and dyed in Prato, one of Europe's historic textile centres, according to the seventeen colours of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

When I first began working with these colours, I saw them as a kind of visual alphabet. Introduced alongside the Paris Agreement in 2015, the SDGs represented an ambitious attempt to formulate a shared planetary agenda. Each colour stood for a different aspiration: ending poverty, reducing inequality, protecting ecosystems, improving health, education and wellbeing. Together they suggested that humanity might be able to coordinate around a common future.

Over the following decade, however, the questions became more difficult.

Climate change accelerated. Biodiversity loss accelerated. Inequality remained stubbornly high. Increasingly, it became clear that sustainability could not be discussed separately from questions of power, wealth and global justice.

The yarn remains the same. Twenty kilograms of carefully produced fibres, carrying the colours of a particular historical moment. Yet the meaning of those colours continues to evolve.

Today, I find myself reading the Sustainable Development Goals through the lens of the Global Justice Report and related research on planetary boundaries and inequality. The question is no longer only how to achieve sustainable development, but how responsibilities, resources and opportunities are distributed between different groups of people and different parts of the world.

In this sense, the yarn functions less as an illustration of a finished worldview and more as an invitation to think with history. The colours represent a moment of global optimism. The work that follows asks what we have learned since then.

As the Millennium Tapestry develops towards 2030, the Global Justice Report will serve as an important point of departure for this continuing investigation. Rather than abandoning the aspirations embodied in the SDGs, I am interested in following their implications further: towards questions of consumption, inequality, knowledge systems and the relationship between the Global North and Global South.

The material remains unresolved. Perhaps that is precisely why it remains useful.