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Paper short abstract:

In this lab participants will use embroidery as a tool of mutual memory-work. How can embroidering, passing a needle between fabric from one side to another, feeling the threads move smoothly or entangle and learning to stitch together stimulate memory, connection and correspondence?

Paper long abstract:

How does embroidering stimulate memory and attentiveness? How can colored thread become a “line [that] grows from a point that has been set in motion, as the plant grows from its seed” (Tim Ingold 2010: 91)? What does it mean to follow the line of another person through stitching together? How is inner attention also attention to each other? What is the time and space of making? What are the rhythms of making? Might we see stitcher and thread in-practice like the flyer and kite “understood not as interacting entities, alternately playing agent to the other as patient, but as trajectories of movement, responding to one another in counterpoint, alternately as melody and refrain” (Tim Ingold, 2010: 96). This lab will reflect and expand upon two embroidery workshops I conducted previously and upon my long-term artistic collaboration with Palestinian-American artist Kanaan Kanaan on durational embroidery-performance-installations. The first workshop “Stitching Lines Together” was created for A Confluence of Ways: Design, Anthropology and Artistic Practice, held in the University of Aberdeen, for the Knowing from the Inside Project of the Anthropology Department, May 2, 2018. The second was an experiential practice-based session entitled “Bordar sobre la memoria: el cuerpo-mente del aprendizaje artesanal,” for the III Encuentro Latinoamericano de investigadores sobre cuerpos y corporalidades en las culturas, held in the Museo nacional de las culturas del mundo, Mexico City, November 6-9, 2018. This lab will gather participants together to embroider material and immaterial lines of entanglements through shared making, discussion, readings, and silence.