'Spinning Bee', PARK, 2022
Mixed media installation

Text:
The space resembles a traditional informal textile workspace, based on historical examples of communal textile gatherings that were common in Medieval Europe.
 

As a kind of late-Medieval night-life, these gatherings offered a platform both for the learning and sharing of textile crafts, as well as a place for story telling; communal singing; relaxing; courting; dressing-up/role-play; and much more.

In the dark of night, gathered around the hearth, these spaces functioned as a place of refuge from paternal supervision and control, and as such allowed for a countercultural and subversive potential to emerge.
 

The textile workspace at PARK will be the decor of a performance that will be developed during the exhibition and performed on October 1st. In this performance a historical link between textile, textile tools and the voice (through communal singing) will be explored.

'Textile Workshop', 2022
Open Studio presentation for 'RijksOpen2022'.

Text:
A late medieval woodcut print by Hans Sebald Beham depicts a village spinning bee spun out of control. At the time, it was distributed as propaganda, a moralistic speculation of the unruly orgiastic events the authorities imagined took place at the local spinning bees. These textile gatherings were notorious for their transgression of norms, and indeed offered nightly refuge from paternal supervision for the (young) villagers to engage in social, sexual, and other forms of communal experimentation. As such, they offered a place for countercultural and subversive potential. These bees eventually got prohibited, pushing them underground and into obscurity, continuing in the dark of night.

In the absence of any textile facilities at the Rijksakademie, I have spent the last year setting up a textile workshop in my studio, following the tradition of the nightly village spinning bee. Communal touch-based textile processes facilitate unruly entanglements. Moments of weaving and spinning are met with forms of informal knowledge production and exchange. The space offers a breeding ground for the knotting of various lines of thought, threads, and bodies. At night, these are expressed more through touch than through vision.