Threads and Traces - The String Revolution1
In his notebooks, the painter Paul Klee repeatedly insisted that the processes of genesis and growth that give rise to forms in the world we inhabit are more important than the forms themselves. ‘Form is the end, death’, he wrote. ‘Form-giving is life’……I want to argue that what Klee said of art is true of skilled practice in general, namely that it is a question not of imposing preconceived forms on the inert matter but of intervening in the fields of force and currents of material wherein forms are generated. Practitioners, I contend, are wanderers, wayfarers, whose skill lies in their ability to find the grain of the world’s becoming and to follow its course while bending it to their evolving purpose.2
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Until the 19th Century, Brno distinguished itself by its ability to repel its enemies, resisting the Swedish in the thirty years war and the Prussians in the 18th century, all the time gradually building on its natural defenses until it became practically impregnable. Only capitalism could coax Brno to let down its defenses by demolishing its fortifications when it became the center of the Habsburg Wool processing industry, where easy access and distribution was essential. This short period of time for a very old city, from the mid-19th to late 20th centuries has left indelible traces in bricks, mortar, concrete, steel, and glass, but close to nothing of the materials which caused this golden period, the wool which came from all over the Empire to be processed into the threads which clothed its many diverse peoples.
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In “The Four Elements of Architecture” published in 1851, (the same time as Brno was opening itself up to the Garment trade) Gottfried Semper argued that the once distinguished and now extinguished wall-fitter or weaver of mats, whose skills have migrated to the most disparate cultures, has a most important role to play in the history of art. He argued that architecture should be like a garment: “The German word Wand [wall], paries, acknowledges its origin. The terms Wand and Gewand [garment] derive from a single root. That the threading, twisting, and knotting of fibers was among the most ancient of human arts, from which all else was derived, including both building and textiles.
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Our studio this semester attempts to follow these Threads and Traces where they lead us and explore what we could learn from pliantly immersing ourselves in their flows and forces. In a conscious effort to calibrate between conjecture and activism, we will use our finest tool, our hands, to transform bales of wool which will arrive in much the same state as it would have done in Brno’s days as the Moravian Manchester and navigate our way through the threads we create and the traces we leave, following their forces and flows.
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In the turn from spinning a thread to stretching it from point to point lies the ‘hinge’ between bodily movement and abstract reason, between the textilic and the architectonic, between the haptic and the optical, between improvisation and abduction, and between becoming and being. Perhaps the key to the ontology of making is to be found in a length of twine.3
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1. The String Revolution is a term coined by Elizabeth Barber in Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years - Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times” from 1996 published by Norton. “So powerful, in fact, is a simple string in taming the world to human will and ingenuity that I suspect it to be the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth”.
2. The Textility of Making by Tim Ingold, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 34, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 91–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep042, Published:09 July 2009
3. From Lines: A Brief history, chapter 2 Traces, Threads and Surfaces by Tim Ingold, ISBN 9781138640399, Published April 11, 2016, by Routledge