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Gathering in person after more than a year of communicating online, the Living Textiles Collective were delighted at the opportunity to spend time together during a 10 day workshop at ØB-Hytten and Vævestuen Oppfeldt in Hvalsø Denmark.
The collective was founded in 2020 connecting its members through their shared practices of the integration of seeds and plants into textiles as an inquiry into biodesign, naturally smart textiles and dynamic textile expression. Founding members Alice-Marie Archer, Apurva Srihari, Jasmin Sermonet, Lara Campos, Emilie Burfeind, and Svenja Keune bring their respective living textiles practices to the collective, interweaving connections from Argentina, India, Spain, Germany, Austria, UK, Sweden, Denmark and France.
These founding members came together during the workshop with the aim of getting to know one another more deeply, and to exchange our points of view, practices, techniques, tools, and other forms of knowledge that we accumulated over the years.
For each of the workshop participants, we set the task of sharing our practice through a presentation or workshop. Following these we had ample time to think creatively, undertake making and to discuss our work - making use of the ‘messy’ outdoor making space and the ‘clean’ indoor studio. So as to connect ourselves and our practices during the workshop with the ‘place’ we accompanied this activity with walks, visits to the local weaving school and to the neighboring community garden.
Workshop 1: Extrude Biopolymers on woven textiles.
Workshop 2: Create a Textile Vertical Garden.
In terms of workshop activities and presentations we were blessed with an array of opportunities to learn and develop our practices. Apurva taught us how to make seed yarns with a hand-spindle and i-cord machine. We tested a self-developed Hilo E-Spinner that Lara brought with her. Emelie invited us to reimagine our practices as sculptural. Alice introduced theoretical concepts for contemplating our textiles - including the textile hierarchy and how we might employ nature-inspired form archetypes in our textiles. Svenja invited us to think more deeply about how we contemplate our interconnectedness with nature, our embeddedness within the ecologies in which we exist and shared her experience of living closely with her work in her Tiny House which was on the site in Hvalso where we were staying. We were able to explore other frames for inviting the living into our textiles - Svenja brought woven textiles as templates for the manual extrusion of biolopymers for which we harvested clay, ashes, sawdust, lime stone, and sheep-excrements, spending day(s) in the April sun, measuring, mixing, mashing and extruding pastes onto large scale textiles Svenja had made on the jacquard loom at the Swedish School of Textiles. Late into the workshop we went out to weave an installation with an upscaled, seeded and architectural yarn (produced at STFI Chemnitz with their KeMaFil machine) that Jasmin developed as her undergraduate project at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee. We suspended some 60 meters of thick rope-like yarn containing a seed and wool core amongst the trees and hanging slightly into the local brook for irrigation. Finally Lara brought us in closer connection with the living environment and how we could connect to it through our practices and rituals. Svenja continues to update us about progress of the wheatgrass growing from the brook- installation in these following weeks.
Workshop 3: Learn to spin.
Workshop 4: Entangle Architectural Seeded Yarn with Nature.
We allowed ourselves to follow a relatively embodied group process, meeting naturally around meals and activities. Spending most of our waking hours together we found that slowing down and giving space to our collective relational organism was an urge we wanted to follow. We spent a degree of our time taking in the place - and each other. The light in Hvalso was exquisite and the rural location invited connection to the land, engaging all of our senses. In these northern climes the seasons were still shifting. We were heralded by the last of the vernal ponds, the frog and birdsong and the lambs born in the night. Some walked barefoot in the brook and some swam in the lake. The ‘dirty-space’ provided a perfect deck for yoga if you could absolve yourself of the smell of sheep-poo emanating from our extruded biomaterials experiments drying in the sun. We befriended a local dog. Much like our respective textiles practices, doing embodied, kinetic movements together was allowing our buried consciousness to surface. We entered into deep discussions whilst preparing or having dinner, making a fire, relaxing after an activity or whilst walking together. Nature interwove itself with us - feeling the wind from the swans wings as they passed closely overhead, a bee resting on a hand or observing dung beetles emerging from the work.
These unscheduled emerging interactions and exchanges not only with each other and the space/environment/surroundings/culture/community we connected to were fundamental for the mobility experience and would not be possible in a virtual setting. The transformative nature of coming together was something we were not been able to experience in our formerly online-only working. It was through this peaceable being together that we found out we had similar questions and overlapping intentions. The resulting energy of our collective following the workshop is both playful - capturing moments of laughing, singing and dancing with our textiles in tow, and intense - contemplating how our values can be overlain into some kind of manifesto for a living textiles practice. We share our sadness for the loss of relationship between humans and nature and our energy and enthusiasm for textiles as an intervention point through which we can remake, remember, recall our interconnectedness and reciprocity with all life. We share our gratitude for Svenja’s care and attention filled holding of the most magical space and the invitation to connect deeply with the place and each other, and for the iportunus mobility funding that made this gathering possible.
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