A Woven Conversation
For Disc Journal’s second issue, which centers on the theme of “intimacy,” M_A reconvened the participants of “Threads: A conversation about textiles in art and architecture,” a program that complemented Figure’s Veil Craft. Ahree Lee, Casey Baden, Current Interests, Felecia Davis, Figure, and Minga Opazo—individuals and practices committed to woven, soft, tactile material—returned to record answers to five questions about their work with particular attention to their intimate dimensions.
Read about our contributors here.
Disc explores the entanglements between architecture, media, and technology. Each issue has a different theme, form, and design. Disc is editorially independent and para-institutional.
Could you describe how you explore and interrogate intimacy in its various forms by way of introducing your practice/projects with textiles?
Architecture and textiles shelter and dress the human body as protection and as a signifier and are thus tightly bound with feelings of comfort and formations of identity. How do your projects relate and respond to the body, the senses, how we communicate, and how we move through the world?
One associates textiles with their tactility and softness. How does working with textiles prompt a reconsideration of architecture, typically considered to be more permanent and rigid? And vice versa, how does your practice destabilize assumptions about textiles?
Producing and manipulating fiber and fabric requires intense and intricate labor that historically has been gendered, marginalized, and invisibilized. Yet textiles are materials that record labor rather legibly (in the weave, stitch, etc.). How do you negotiate these histories and how do you approach craft and labor as they relate to the medium?
And lastly, in the spirit of creating new intimacies, can you share some other practices, texts, scholars, scientists, etc. that you look to and think/create with?