HABITATIONS is a 3-part installation exploring both the places we inhabit, and in turn inhabit us, and the embodied mathematical structures used in traditional handweaving. Through repetitious gestures and processes—habits—weaving produces its own kind of embodied cognitive structures. These structures are a kind of dwelling that allows us to see and make relation. Relationships are not simply the interaction between things, but the consequential (and on-going) results of those interactions. In this way, one may argue that relationships are ultimately algorithmic.
The word algorithm has certain connotations that often strip it of its inherently animated and relational nature. Situated within the world of computer technologies, there is a disembodied sense to its reality and use—numbers/instructions interacting with other numbers/instructions that result in responses/actions/new or altered sets of instructions, and so on. What if we reembodied this term; ‘returned’ it to its living and effectual roots and habits and ways of being? After all, looms themselves were the original computers. I believe it is a useful exercise in orientation; an intervention to consider the relatedness of algorithm, weaving, kinship, and ecology. Algorithms are after all an apt description of process: rather than simply static moments or results—they describe movements, conversations, collaborations, contaminations—however open-ended they may be. One must embody algorithms when weaving. Algorithms become gestural, the weavings they produce traces of these repetitious gestures.
When I first began learning how to weave, I would lay awake every night and sit with numbers. There is a kind of letting go necessary in imagining algorithms. One must be many places at once—and in this sense, math becomes spatialized. Weaving materializes it. After all, weaving is fundamentally relational, existing within encounters: between threads, between the fibers that constitute those threads and the lived lives from which those fibers are extracted. I weave with those who have woven before me; I feel an embodied kinship and relation to their gestures, their rhythms, their ambient thoughts and feelings, I touch what they have touched, caressing cloth: whether a Swedish woman in 19th century Jämtland or a Diné weaver of Turtle Island. We ‘in-habit’ these gestures, practices, repetitions—and the cloths they produce. In this sense, weaving is essentially collaborative: across species, generations, and temporalities. It is also practice and process, necessitating a variety of knowledges and endlessly repetitive, even mundane, embodied gestures. Yet, there is a spaciousness, like a gestural mantra or chant, where time feels different—I could be anywhere. The brain drifts. One’s awareness becomes ambient—spreading itself across multiple considerations and temporalities. These thoughts/feelings/intuitions—spacious and open-ended—become embedded within the woven fabric itself, materializing inner worlds.
Cloth holds memory, to be touched and made material, portable, traceable. When analyzing the origins of the fibers used to make a piece of cloth, textile archaeologists often refer to a material’s memory. Certain fibers, depending on the plant or animal they come from, hold creases and gestures to varying degrees. Wool for example, doesn’t have a long memory (meaning no wrinkles in the fabric), whereas linen does. When a linen shirt ca. 3000 BC was recovered from the tomb of Tarkhan in 1912, the sleeves still held the gesture of its former wearer. There is something deeply evocative about the image—the traces of human animation a kind of haunting, a collaborative memory between the body of the wearer and the body of the flax plant from which the fiber was taken.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold explores the epistemological and ontological orientations and spaces that result through practice— “telling by hand”, which considers ‘making’ as a way of telling and knowing: “The verb ‘to tell’ has two related senses. On the one hand, a person who can tell is able to recount the stories of the world. On the other hand, to tell is to be able to recognize subtle cues in one’s environment and to respond to them with judgement and precision.”
In this way, ‘telling’ is not simply communicative, but a way of seeing and knowing. Making/knowing/telling are therefore intertwined, intimate, entangled. What we make and how we make tells others (and ourselves) something about who and what we are, what we know, what we value, what we feel. This ‘making’ is not only related to art. It can also extend to the relationships we create. Extraction and collaboration are both ways of relating, with vastly different means and outcomes. The ways we relate—or ‘make’ relationships—matter. In this sense, what do our relationships, and our ways of relating generally, tell us about who we are, what we know and how we know it; who/what we value (and who/what we don’t) and why? And in turn, how are these making/knowing/telling-s reflected in the art we create and consume?
The accumulative aspect of capitalism; the sheer inconceivable quantities of things and deaths has become almost impossible to imagine. Hand weaving’s ability to materialize vast quantities of encounters through visual patterns allows one to interact anew with the unquantifiable. One touches numbers through intimate encounter. Weaving acts as a visual and tactile reorientation to complex and interdependent living structures. The materials and mechanisms used to create cloth constitute a wide range of living systems, embodied technologies, animated geographies, and lived lives.
Quine(s) in computer technology describe a structure or object that contains the instructions to re-create itself. Weaving patterns are akin to these. One only needs to know how to look, how to see—how to ‘track’ the making of the cloth. If tracking is a way of seeing, observing, knowing; then traces are a way of telling. Tracking is an orientation, that looks for relationships, for the traces of interactions between things. Traces result from repetitive movements and gestures between things. Much like the repeated footfalls recorded in trails, or the residue of decay from microbial interactions with animal and plants bodies—traces record encounters, collaborations, and even transformations.
There is an inherent balance and reciprocity in weaving, with the negotiation between warp and weft threads, and the complex patterns they make. In this sense, weaving presents a kind of ecological orientation—considering and materially connecting lived lives and the subsequent effects of these lives when they encounter each other. Making kin, whether it is within or across species, is process and practice—not simply an exercise in orientation (though it may begin there, over and over again), it is rather a continual state of relating (again and again), and like all relationships, developing intricate connections and bonds that strengthen over time and use. We become with the relationships we nurture, the practices we inhabit.
In 1957, my great-grandmother returned to Sweden for the first time since emigrating to the United States in 1910. She kept a detailed diary, which I utilized in the spring/summer of 2019 in order to retrace her steps in through Sweden. I first traveled with my parents and sister Debbie to the family farm in Minnesota, where we buried our grandmother’s ashes in the farmyard.
The following video documents these family sites, or habitations—cut and stitched together via editing—connecting to women’s participation in early filmmaking. There was a correlation between sewing and the editing of film: cutting, arranging, and connecting back together. This is beautifully illustrated in a remarkable scene from the 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, in which images of women working in the editing room are juxtaposed with shots of women working at sewing machines. I’ve approached the following with a similar mindset, considering sewing-severing-suturing as both a material process, as well as a conceptual one.
The first half of the film connects different Swedish-American ancestral locations gathered from a variety of sources and research material, including our great-grandmother’s diary. Additional sources include birth certificates, family letters/correspondence between the USA and Sweden, family oral lore, various archives, and Swedish emigration records. It is my attempt to document the places known and familiar to our Swedish ancestors, and to suture the severed lines between the USA and Sweden—making the lists of place names, maps, and elements of family lore both visible and tangible. I wanted to inhabit the spaces, and connect to the places that my ancestors inhabited, and in turn I hoped the places would inhabit me—leave their traces, their imprints and shapes. What I encountered, to my surprise, were ghosts—habitations without their inhabitants, traces of people who are no longer here. The only people visible throughout the film are my parents—the last remaining family members who intimately knew the original Swedish immigrants and their families back in Sweden.
Summer farms where our great-grandmother and ancestors for many generations worked every summer. In central/northern areas of Sweden, women took cattle and goats into the mountains/boreal forests where they would spend 2-4 months every summer grazing, milking, and making various dairy products (as well as a set about textiles, knitted and embroidered). Arable land was scarce and the growing season extremely limited due to the long winters (in some areas the growing season was only 2-3 months). Therefore, Swedes in the area depended on dairy products, which constituted up to 15-25% of their yearly caloric intake. The same farms and forests were also used outside of the summer season for reindeer herding and grazing by the local indigenous Sámi people. (Video stills below.)
In June of 2019, a news story circulated across the internet in regards to a town in Norway that had apparently petitioned the government to officially eliminate clock time on their small northern island. After being granted permission, locals celebrated by strewing clocks across the road and driving over them. If someone wanted to mow their lawn at 3:00am, they were allowed. In the end, the story ended up being a publicity stunt, but the lived reality isn’t far from the fictionalized one presented. One attunes to a different way of being in time and place. The times of the day are marked by different bird songs rather than transitions between light and dark. Time itself feels more like a habitation, a place.
The second half of the film documents the lead up to summer solstice in subarctic/arctic Sweden while I was participating in an artist residency at Ricklundgården in Saxnäs, Västerbotten. During the months of June and July the days seemed endless, with the sun never fully setting—simply hovering along the mountains around midnight and moving across the horizon until the sun officially rose again around 2:00 a.m. Dusk and dawn stretched themselves across hours. This extended liminal time is often referred to as a kind of “third time”. Living in a continuous liminality, one attunes to very different rhythms and temporal realities.
Summer farms where our great-grandmother and ancestors for many generations worked every summer. In central/northern areas of Sweden, women took cattle and goats into the mountains/boreal forests where they would spend 2-4 months every summer grazing, milking, and making various dairy products (as well as a set about textiles, knitted and embroidered). Arable land was scarce and the growing season extremely limited due to the long winters (in some areas the growing season was only 2-3 months). Therefore, Swedes in the area depended on dairy products, which constituted up to 15-25% of their yearly caloric intake. The same farms and forests were also used outside of the summer season for reindeer herding and grazing by the local indigenous Sámi people. (Video stills below.)
HABITATIONS II is an audio installation exploring habitations—both in the corporeal sense of place and time via field recordings collected throughout Minnesota and Sweden in the summer of 2019—but also extending to musical structures as dwellings. The audio features several different musical traditions: a recording of our grandmother singing a Swedish folk song prior to her death in 2018, several Swedish archival recordings of women kulning (musical herding calls), and lastly, a Lithuanian sutartinės arranged, performed, and recorded by myself while in Sweden.
Lithuanian sutartinės are polyphonic ritual songs for two, three, and four voices. Both the songs and their associated dances are based on weaving structures, whose movements and aural components mimic pick-up weaving (compound weaves using twill derivative structures for pattern and tabby for the underlying structural foundation in order to produce woven belts). The interwoven musical phrases produce a kind of tension derived from the use of 2nds—or clashing notes—and their release. These aural articulations mimic the intersections between warp and weft, reflecting both pattern and foundational structure. The term ‘sutartinės’ derives from the verb “to agree” or “to attune” with another person. Sung traditionally by women in various settings, often outdoors, the songs were highly coded and symbolic. Each sutartinės contains two primary independent musical phrases: rinkėja and pritarėja. The terms share etymological roots with similar terminology used in weaving. “Rinkėja”, meaning “collector”, sings the words or narrative/poetic content and directly relates to the term “rinktinės juosto”, meaning “collected belts” (i.e. woven belts). Likewise, “Pritarėja”, meaning “chanter/refrain”, sings repetitive vocables (sounds/words without apparent meaning). These are often considered emotive in nature, and act as the songs’ repetitive underlying foundation.
This particular sutartinės, “Bite Babilėli Dabilio” is a ritual song for the blessing of bees, who are considered sacred animals in Lithuania. In fact, Lithuanian folklore is replete with stories about bees as the weavers of their honeycombs, and even have a long list of diminutive names for these “bee friends”, such as “bite” in the song.
“Rosegång (Rosepath),” “Jämtlandsdräll”, “Overshot”, “Summer and Winter,” “Fish in the Pond,” each of these names refer to a particular weave, or rather, a set of structures and/or perimeters with which to weave a seemingly endless variety of like patterns. Weaving itself is a complex set of practices, sites, objects, algorithms, and materials that allude any kind of static or singular definition or onomastic (the study of names and naming) category. Rather, a weaving name acts as a kind of ‘shorthand’ akin to ‘indexing’ in oral culture. These traveling names are used to describe and/or point to what is essentially a mathematical, algorithmic design language. Nonetheless, the names exhibit a kind of social cohesion amongst those who share this mathematical ‘language’, even across geographical and linguistic borders.
The 17 weavings presented in the Lineages exhibition utilized the traditional Swedish pattern Jämtlandsdräll—a woven structure named after a region in north central Sweden. The use of a toponym (place name) in the naming of the pattern, and in particular one that corresponds to my matrilineal ancestral home, is what initially drew me to the pattern. Individually and collectively, the weavings explore and exhibit a subset of possible variations within the pattern. Though I utilize only traditional fibers found in historical Jämtlandsdräll weavings, such as cotton, linen, nettle, and wool, I play with various sizes of thread—often revealing the interplay between the complex compound structures of twill and plain weave. The materials themselves connect to other geographies of origin (along with their related multi-directional histories): linen from Lithuania and Sweden, cotton from the southern United States and Mexico, wool from Northern Ireland and Iceland, and so on.
The process of weaving approximately 50 objects using Jämtlandsdräll over the course of 20 months at times felt as though I was building a house. The structure became a kind of dwelling I constructed, inhabited, and rearranged again and again—like a habit. Simultaneously, I engaged in a variety of related research projects, including the folkloric onomastic naming of ‘local’ weaving structures in Sweden and their subsequent migrations, modifications, and translations in the United States at the end of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century. In particular, I considered the toponymic naming of the twill derivative compound structure referred to as ‘Jämtlandsdräll,’ or ‘Jämtlandsväv,’ and its later name change to ‘crackle’ in the United States by Mary Meigs Atwater in 1928. Deeply embedded within the Hemslöjden movement in Sweden (along with its American counterpart), Jämtlandsdräll is treated as a marker displaying a variety of possible social and cultural associations, attachments, identities, and meanings. Each of these themes intimately reflects the socio-historical shifts taking place at the turn of the century due to urbanization and mass emigration. These migrations significantly altered previous social and familial cohesions and configurations as anchored in place.
I propose the name acts as a kind of transient mnemonic memory device, tying people to community via the invocation of a specific place: conjuring home and creating a form of transient geography through interaction with particular woven structures. As a fundamentally tactile medium, weaving allows one to touch and materialize place, and subsequently, cultural identity from afar. The transient nature of cloth and weaving structures themselves reconstitute notions and associations with home, identity, culture, and genealogies across geographical and cultural borders—a form of (re)membering.