Folded Life

“Folded Life: Talking Textile Politics” is a research project conceived by curator Grant Watson. It is developed in collaboration with editor Jill Winder and supported by the Johann Jacobs Museum, Zürich. It includes documentation of interviews conducted in-person and remotely by Grant Watson with a diverse group of interviewees, whose personal and political engagements with textiles are explored through a discussion of a single textile object of their choosing.

Conceptually and curatorially “Folded Life: Talking Textile Politics” starts from the understanding that textiles function as a field of social meaning, temporally and spatially ubiquitous but flexible and contingent in terms of use and setting. At the same time textiles can be alive with subjective attachments and personalized references. Often the origin of the individual textile is elsewhere. Made by unknown hands through obscured chains of production, determined by factors including race, gender, and class, through global hierarchies of exploitation, and market distribution. Even if textiles are made locally, the fibres and dyes are likely to have been harvested or extracted at a distance. And colours and patterns reflect contacts made centuries ago, implicating histories of trade and violence, cultural exchange, and appropriation that produce new readings in the present. Through this the textile object interpolates us into a relation with distant processes as well as questions of social justice and ecology, which demand an attention that goes beyond ethical consumption.

“Folded Life: Talking Textile Politics” explores this aspect of textiles and brings out the often-overlooked way that textiles position us in an intimate relation to the life world. Anchored in a particular time and place, textiles become folded into a life, as a valued possession or for daily use. As cultural artifacts textiles also have the potential to express values, to disrupt and to dissent through meaning, making, and style. This has been the case with feminist, gay liberation, and queer sensibilities. As art historian Lucy Lippard has pointed out, textiles have had an important role to play in feminist art practices, where making for pleasure (hobbies), making collectively (sewing bees), or making for politics (banners) have all been incorporated in order to upturn existing hierarchies. Likewise queer cultures have self-identified with a “feminine” perception of textiles as a way to subvert expectations about gender and have used textiles for the purpose of masquerade or to enhance sexual practices, as in the intricate bondage techniques developed from Japanese Shibari knotting. In this way, as art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has written, a “textile politics” not only refers to “how textiles have been used to advance political agendas;” it also points to how textiles can be used to make the political “material.”