Paper short abstract:

An arts center in inner city Johannesburg is currently also becoming a research center, particularly focused on the cultural heritage of fabric throughout the African continent and thus the migrant community. Working alongside my field on this, my role as fieldworker changed.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I firstly describe how an arts center is trying to obtain knowledge about itself and its others, seeking to connect with its surrounding neighborhoods, through research on and representation of African fabrics. I have come to understand this as a strategy and practice of weaving the arts center into the daily lives of the neighborhood and vice versa. Secondly, in considering the expression of "this side" and "that side" commonly used by Joburgers and often used as geographical markers both in terms of the city and the world, I discuss this strategy of weaving as a way of softening the logics of the post-apartheid city and xenophobia. And thirdly, in researching this strategy, I found myself increasingly relating to the arts center as both my field and a research partner.

I thus ask how the notion of field, fieldwork and research institution change when the field is understood 1) as a strategy of weaving and 2) through a practice of collaboration (rather than as a research object in a more classic sense). Inspired by their strategy, I seek to develop a heuristic of weaving to think through the relationship of another this and that side, namely the field and the institutions we report back to (my translation of the panel's "home" and "in between fieldwork"). The thissidedness of that side puts attention both to an empirical strategy and to my way of being in between this and that side. As such, empirics and theory are interwoven.