Notes On Weaving

Shanghai, 2016. It could have been anywhere in the world. But none of those places would have been like the carpet of the hotel’s grand hall. This was where the artists and curators invited to the 11th Shanghai Biennial, curated by Raqs Media Collective, resided.

This huge carpet became a meeting place every night. People met here to exchange views, discuss ideas, celebrate birthdays, read poems, or sing traditional Indian or Russian songs. These interactions formed other worlds extending beyond the words, thoughts, and sensations they began with. Discussions were tied to questions, necessities to truths, meanings to the actual, and simple moments to serious events. This carpet became a bridge between worlds that, on the surface, appeared to have nothing in common, between lives that seemingly shared little.

I. The following lines revolve around a polysemic definition of the carpet, both as an object and a representation, as space and territory, as form and technique, as gesture and performance. The carpet can be put to use as a metaphor to “reason around” the works and their exhibition. We constantly create and exhibit works. This raises a moral and aesthetic question. How can we exhibit these works? And what does ‘exhibiting’ mean? We must explore the different life forms a work of art can take because the exhibition is not a settled entity. It is a changing, moving, and unstable form. It is like the carpet at the hotel. A surface made of images and figures. A space that constantly recedes and redefines itself.

The artist is an inventor of impossible or unthinkable spaces, open or moving forms. A work is never anchored in a place or a territory. It is here and elsewhere; it is from here and from elsewhere. Like the carpet, it is confronted with technological transformations, with newly emerging relationships to the world that determine new geographies and chronologies. It is part of the fabric of all these existences. The same is true of the exhibition. It takes in the stories of all these things, all these lives. It is an act of understanding the world.

But let’s go back to the carpet. Every carpet is unique, even when composed of the same materials and made with the same techniques. Weaving is both a banal and straightforward process and a dense and complex act. It is the act of knotting a thread, and another thread, and tying one fragment to another. Through this act, weaving creates a new reality designed to fashion territory and offer a habitat—a roof, a place, a site.

II. Yet, the carpet is not an immovable or frozen object. It is the result of a matrix consisting of successive additions. It is a space of transition between the body and its environment. Still, it is also a gesture, a situation. Weaving doesn’t carry closure within it. It is a union without borders, without closure, one that is constantly open. Weaving is not just an act; it is a space that can be created, remade and undone. There are a few such experiences. In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope weaves and unweaves; she does and undoes. She highlights the act itself: doing, claiming time and action, then undoing, to deny this time and this action. By carrying out both actions, one after the other, she stresses the importance of this double movement – weaving or unweaving, composing and decomposing, before each activity merges into the other. Weaving and unweaving, doing and undoing, make the surfaces or the frames disappear before re-tensioning them. This brings each thread back to its point of origin, and yet, for the same reason, it constantly questions each thread, each gesture, each frame.

Within each carpet, there is a world, or even multiple worlds. This intimate relationship should govern our relationship with art and all the writings associated with the exhibition. The artisan model, its ideal, lies in diversity. Reinventing a shape from the same vocabulary is the same act, but the shapes differ each time. It is about know-how and about constantly seeking to re-read the same material.

Artisans are holders of the knowledge of millennia. Each gesture and each act manifests the knowledge our ancestors found and transformed. Each gesture contains that of all previous generations, which comes to be reincarnated in this gesture in our present time. Each gesture also draws places filled with new human lives. This practice is experienced with each thread and each knot. The artisans assemble stories and create new narratives. Yet their expertise can be questioned anytime, challenged by a new reading or piece of material. Weaving is work and innovation.

This act of creation, moreover, has meaning only in the context of all the shapes invented in the past. It belongs to a line of vanished or preserved inventions that have inhabited the world across centuries and regions, accumulating adaptations and novelties in each iteration. Shapes reinvent themselves, then disappear; they don’t belong to a single time. Weaving is the fruit of the knowledge and cultures of those who came before us. But every artisan, every artist, every curator and every individual participates in all those prior worlds. When we read, we are the readers of all others. When we write, we align our gestures with those who have gone before us. Creation lies in the frictions between ancestral and contemporary techniques . It is never settled in one place and at a given time.

III. From this perspective, the carpet belongs as much to the one who makes it as to the one who keeps it; its ownership lies between the creator and the recipient, and can be read both in terms of creation and as an element of everyday life. The carpet is made by a human being who intends for others to have it—an act of reading one body and writing for another. This shift in the carpet’s ownership and positioning resonates with all aspects of our existence. It belongs to the mind, the body, the environment, and the world. Each carpet establishes a back-and-forth between ourselves and the world, between us and things. It offers a dramatisation of our place in the world.

The artisan draws or writes the territory, giving it a shape that will be known to others. But this tuned, new, drawn shape will exist as a physical confrontation with other bodies and other environments, the components of which must be deciphered. The carpet is a space of union and difference; it separates and associates us with a place or territory. It is both division and inclusion. This back-and-forth between the specific and the universal, between the individual and the universe, can also be articulated as speech. Within this complex reality, we can consider, by extension, latent (underlying) political, geographical and historical aspects.

Our present is a carpet, which in turn is a product of the past. It is transformed or reinvented by new, future and possible additions, by the breakage of threads, and by the sometimes-unexpected meeting of different substances on its surface or underneath it.

From this model, from this singular frame, with these openings and these folds, it is necessary to understand and perceive the resistances that sometimes seem to reduce artistic practices to patterns of cultural isolationism or political questions from the twentieth century. Even when they are at the root of certain fractures or polarisations of the 21st century, these questions are not just the object and subject of our time but an astonishing and fragmented network, a succession of gestures or movements that are alternately concave and convex, centrifugal and centripetal, moving away and coming closer; articulating and dislocating. Lyrical, organic or geometrical, they act like an organism—continually transforming according to the games of inversions and lineaments, layers and conversions, folds and contacts.

IV. Exhibiting is knowing how to bind and how to weave. It is learning how to read and identify materials which carry all the words and adventures of those who preceded us. It must do as our ancestors did, drawing new frames and constellations. The exhibition allows us to circulate amongst the different ways the world has been used. We can listen to existences. Art and life are not separate. Art is about reporting on a given world, not just a self-manifestation. Writing and life are the two consequences of this art of reading, in which the past is an element of contemporary existence that is lived in the present.

There is, therefore, a continuity between life, our ancestors and the future. This continuity, let us remember, is not linear; it does not simply make the past the present, or the present the future. It both follows and creates twists in time. To live fully in one’s time, one should be able to consider the idea of being, even for an instant, a third person living here or elsewhere. The artist’s destiny enables them to integrate into all lives and to assimilate all the traces of reading existences within themselves.

In a similar vein, carpets do not disappear; they transform. Carpets are not relics of some vanished beauty. They are not separated from life; they are part of it. They are the world itself. From now on, an adventure in one form cannot be conducted without confronting all others. Patterns meet in the creation of new senses, new geographies and new chronologies. There is a superposition of several worlds, territories and temporalities.

We cannot live an island existence. This extension of scope—evoked by Edouard Glissant—opens the story from all sides, creating new reference systems. “Creolisation is a way to change continuously without getting lost. It is a space where dispersion makes it possible to gather, where culture shocks, disharmony, disorder and interference become creators. It is the creation of an open and inextricable culture, which shakes up standardisation by major media and art centres.” It should be understood that our present is no longer localised in the streets of Moscow, Casablanca, Delhi and New York. One has to know how to weave to be able to interact with life. Nothing is fundamentally set any longer in what constitutes our identity. The latter cannot be fully articulated verbally—it must be experienced instead. It is necessary to measure the instability of identity, its porosity, and its capacity to play with the now indefinite boundaries between the political and the individual. One cannot enclose an identity within the narrow limits of its origins. According to this artistic cartography, it is more relevant to question the cultural references present in work; to analyse and understand how these are operated or bypassed. Indeed, any production reflects, by its diversity, a creative dynamic based on a singular framework of space and time. There is no beginning, no sequence, no end. One cannot understand a work without summoning the full extent of the woven fabric.

V. Doesn’t Michel Foucault refer to carpets as moving surfaces—as ‘moving gardens through space’? Thinking of plants, for Emanuele Coccia, is attempting to consider oneself in the world, in the middle of what surrounds us. “‘It is not by linking together exclusively phenomena that have the same nature or the same shape (physical phenomena, social facts) that we can come to understand the world. The world is not a space defined by the order of causes, but rather by the climate of influences, the meteorology of atmospheres.”. Every knowledge penetrates and is penetrated by all the others. The world is thus a mixture: “Every worldly being is in the world with the same intensity as that with which the world is in him.”. This mixture of worlds also proposes that cultures no longer exist in isolation. The combination of the worlds outside the plant is added to it, and this scope is not limited to vegetation; it integrates all other kingdoms of nature (such as stones, water, air, and light). This is about taking in a world of ‘non-separation’. About a caesura, a world of coexistence and perhaps cohesion. We live in an order which is neither the ground nor the cosmos, but both simultaneously. These entities, without distinction—the earth and the sky, or cosmos—define our relationship to the world concurrently. Through the lens of this opening, we must rediscover our world and inhabit it in the present and through the course of existence.

An anchoring in the present is essential to the artist’s and the curator’s activity. They treat all times as belonging to the present. Time is only in the present. But ‘the present’ is not simply the knot where different times are tied together. It is a space where things come together: the crucible of time, setting in motion and being transformed to manifest its instability. Artists seek to assemble shapes, placing them side by side. Sometimes, they even assemble archives, information or data. The artist as curator is not simply the artist performing the act of selecting and presenting. The exhibition becomes a form of art, shaping a work of art. The curator acts as the artisan who assembles different components to create a new coherent reality. The traditional form of curating is exposure. But like carpet weaving, curating is also the fashioning of a living space. The one gives us an object to behold; the other unfolds a world in a vision. The curator weaves together different interests, reactions and artistic practices. The carpet is like knots or constellations in the space of our consciousness of art.

These reflections resist the idea of separations. They posit the carpet as a place of sharing, life, and critical reflection, similar to the experience I lived through in Shanghai with Raqs Media Collective. This was no longer about working on art but a space with art, where art worked on us in return. Irrigated by art, nature, politics, and life in general, the carpet observes us. We pave our way with those who have preceded us, while we look ahead and see other generations approaching.

This territory or space is not a fixed or set entity. It is a matrix that continues to evolve with additions and comments—a matrix that holds many other approaches we didn’t have time to explore, including displacement, movement and nomadism. The carpet is also nomadic—it is evolutionary and representative of an accumulative reality. But that is for another time, another weave.