Looking out of the corner of one's eye The act of weaving and politics
A seminar that invites you to share a space for dialogue, poetry and thinking about the social, spatial and temporal skills that emerge from the act of weaving as open source. An act understood as a field of meaning; that is, as a structural process that simultaneously enables the creation of language and object, while at the same time being a creation conveyed by the body. Linguistic and material coexistence makes it possible to approach the backstories of trade, exchange and violence, as well as establishing new approaches to the geographical and genealogical contingencies of the present.
In this seminar, Teresa Lanceta’s work will function as a vantage point from which to approach the politics of textiles. The title refers to Oblicuas calles (Oblique streets), one of her texts in which the artist addresses the codes of the migrant bodies that inhabit Barcelona’s Raval district. Looking out of the corner of one’s eye, looking crookedly in the oblique streets of a place plagued by tourism and contradiction, is a code of suspicion and mutual respect. And so are the anonymous creations of numerous women from the Middle Atlas whose experiences, often relegated to the margins of history, go against the grain of normative languages in order to communicate from another place. The ecological and social ethics to which weaving frequently responds show that the act of weaving is a political experience capable of transmitting, dissenting and subverting life expectations.
Programme
Wednesday 1 June
Presentation of the seminar by Laura Vallés Vílchez
Curator of the exhibition Teresa Lanceta. Weaving as open source.
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Contemporary art curator, writer and biotechnologist, Berlin.Questions and discussion
7:45 pm
Iniciativa Sexual Femenina
Within the framework of the seminar and in response to a specific commission from the exhibition’s curators, the Iniciativa Sexual Femenina collective will present a performance in the rooms of the exhibition Teresa Lanceta. Weaving as Open Source, which the artist dedicates to Barcelona’s Raval neighbourhood. A geographical space of diasporas, full of experiences for Teresa Lanceta, who lived there from 1969 to 1985.
They don’t walk, they float. Their gutsy earrings and the train of their dresses are not decoration, they are pocketknives. The heels they wear are not high to make them tall, but rather to reduce the distance that separates them from the sky. Their shoes are like the chairs used by lifeguards at the beach, but they are keeping their eye on the male gaze, the wooden walkways and the works at the MACBA. The room belongs to them; these women are the danger here.
Thursday 2 June
Grant Watson
Curator and researcher at the Royal College of Art, London.
Social Fabric. This lecture will address ‘textile politics’ in relation to the interscaler nature of cloth, as a field of social meaning linked to labour, trade, colonial violence, cultural appropriation and exchange, as well as its many subjective attachments. Often the origin of a textile lies 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 – bringing us into a relation with distant processes as well as questions of ecology and social justice.
As cultural artifacts, textiles also have the potential to express values, to disrupt and dissent through meaning making and style, as has been the case with feminist, gay liberation and queer sensibilities. These various forms of ‘textile politics’ will be discussed with reference to a series of projects by Grant Watson including, Textiles: Art and the Social Fabric (2010), Social Fabric (2012), Textiles: Open Letter (2013), and Folded Life: Talking Textile Politics (2021).
Natasha Ginwala
Curator and writer, Gropius Bau, Berlin and Colomboscope, Sri Lanka.
I weave your Name on the Loom of my Mind. Commencing from the wisdom of fifteenth-century mystic weaver-poet Kabir and the lifework of poet artist Cecilia Vicuña, this excursus draws together the Taana-baana (warp and weft) of artistic practices emerging from narratives of migration, testimonial production and contested belonging. The stitch carves out personal mappings, time leaps and resonates subversion – it is this capacity of rupture and repair that we attend to in the works of Areez Katki, Hema Shironi and Vinoja Tharmalingam exhibited as part of Language is Migrant, the seventh edition of interdisciplinary arts festival Colomboscope in Sri Lanka.
Questions and discussion
Luz Pichel and Teresa Lanceta
Reading of poems and texts in the galleries of the exhibition Teresa Lanceta. Weaving as open source.The activity will be held in the MACBA Meier Auditorium, but it can also be followed live on the museum’s website and YouTube channel, except for the two performance sessions that will take place in the exhibition galleries. In English with simultaneous interpreting service (presence-based only). If you have any question, feel free to contact us on 93 481 33 68 or by email at macba [at] macba [dot] cat
