A while ago I was contacted by Linh Le from Becoming Species since she and they were interested in my knotting practice. We meet and knotted together.
I could not be happier – now the knotting practice has a life of its own. If you are interested in the development of the knotting practice please follow the tag #coknotting
I have made this video “Knotting Ecosystems” for Becoming Species as an open source tutorial. The video contains images from “knotting ecosystems” events hosted by Becoming Species and Extinction Rebellion Denmark.
I hope you will be inspired to knot together with others and please feel free to share the video in your network.
In the video tutorial I use dummies as the ‘base’ for my knottings. But knottings in-process can be placed on tables, chairs and human bodies.
Remember my way of knotting only one of many. I invite you to develop your technique. Knotting can be done in multiple ways – the only limit is the imagination.
Entanglements is an artwork that I, as artist, suggest is placed in the borderland between textile object, spatial entity, and wearable art. I suggest that the artwork is an object with a performative human and more-than human material-spatial potential. Entanglements are exhibited at MATERIAL THINKING – 1st International Contemporary Material Art Biennale, Tsinghua University, China (02.12.2022–27.01.2023)
This artwork Entanglements build on Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘making kin’ and Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter. ‘Making kin’ suggests that I, the artist, create a relationship to and with the materialities that I craft. When I craft a dynamic tension occurs between me and the vibrant materialities. Through crafting I must listen to and follow the complexity of the materialities. Therefore, I must be sensitive and openminded towards the materialites’ ‘voices’ and ‘wills’. I must listen to how the materialities including their colors wants to be combined and composed. When I craft, I drift and dwell with the materialites. I led them guide me and while crafting Entanglements I came in a mediative state.
At some point in the process and without realizing, my crafting had become quite specific. It was like that I, in my meditative state, began to control the materialities. It was like I forgot our vibrant relationship. I had to stop and re-create the dynamic tension between me and the materialities. I needed help and therefor I decided to invite colleagues like designers, dancers, and choreographers to join me to co-compose and co-embody the composition in multiple ways. In different sessions and with different colleagues, I and we explored other ways of ‘making kin’. We co-explored human-material-relationships, human-material-movements, and material-compositional-potentialities. Our embodied explorations expanded the meaning of ‘making kin’ and awoke my sensibility towards the materialities in unexpected ways. Co-crafting, co-embodying, and co-moving with the crafted materialities became ways of ’making kin’ – actions that left traces of human interaction. Traces of human bodies that have affected, informed, re-formed, composed and re-composed Entanglements. And now dear audience you meet Entanglements and I invite you to leave your traces – and I when I meet Entanglements again, I hope that there are new traces of other bodies.
I am so please to be selected to participate with the paper “Ethical Dilemmas of listening through and with costume” and the video “Costume connections” at Critical Costume 2022.
Video abstract: This Critical Costume exhibition presentation derives from the twelve-hour costume-based ‘performative-walk’ Community Walk (2020). The frame for Community Walk was a bright yellow costume that physically connected two wearers. In Community Walk I, the researcher and costume designer, placed myself ‘in the centre’ of the co-wearing entanglements. For twelve hours I co-wore the costume in the central area of Copenhagen, DK connected to twelve different co-wearers. One hour with each co-wearing participant. In the video I share some of the values that are the foundation for my artistic practice and research – hence, for this project. I unfold aspects of the co-wearing experience. For example, that the costume orientated the co-wearers towards each other and that they as a connected pair had to navigate and negotiate the costume, by-passing spectator(s), and urban environment.
At the PARSE conference I introduced the concept of co-costuming by inviting the participant to wear, explore and reflect on the bodily effects of costumes that connects two wearers. As researcher, I asked the participants to confront the ethically dimensions of the co-costumed experience (costumes that I produced and impose on wearers) that potentially was quite playful and, at the same time, bodily and socially restricted and/or exposeed the co-wearers.
