metatextile:
becoming throgh weaving
Through this Metatextile, I become a weaver. The textile logic unfolds in text, sound, and bodily movement. Here, I condense a portion of my journey into becoming a manual horizontal loom weaver by collecting and reproducing a series of conversations between the loom, the tools involved, and myself as we weave.
I am an apprentice weaver on a floor loom. When the loom and I come together to weave, we prepare the warp, set up the shuttles, and pass the weft from side to side, creating a fabric. However, when the loom and I come together to weave, fabric is not the only thing produced. With each pass of the thread to build the weft, knowledge is produced, transforming me into a weaver.
As the weft thread intertwines with each warp thread, and I learn to weave, I realize that I am not alone. Various masters I have encountered along the way participate in the process. Javier, a weaver on a floor loom for over four decades, participates. Eliana, a teacher and project director, guides me in questioning and learning about textile logic. Also participating are a series of more-than-human artifacts: the loom and tools are also present in my learning.
This project arises from the questions I ask myself while learning to weave on a manual four-harness floor loom. I explore the different languages in which we weave and examine what participates and is produced when weaving from a series of encounters with my different mentors. I seek to record and encapsulate, in a multimedia format, the knowledge produced in these encounters to ultimately create what I decide to call a conversation that accounts for what/who participated and was produced in weaving. The conversations transcend the temporal boundaries of the encounters and are composed as the final result of my learning. They serve as a means to reflect on the act of doing.
The Metatextile is a synthesis from specific records that invites human participation in this assemblage while calling for the intervention of other languages from textile logic. In the loom, the pedal and the action of stepping on it invite a frame and the threads it contains to participate. Following the same logic, this Metatextile has two pedals that call for various records housing the learnings and knowledge that turn me into a weaver, recognizing everything that participates and everything that is produced.
To the rhythm of the sound landscape constructed from the synthesis of audio recorded during each of the encounters I had with the loom and tools, the Metatextile inhabits the space accompanied by the sound of the shuttle entering and exiting and the frames rising and falling. Its composition is entirely textile: stepping on the left pedal involves the fabric produced in a series of encounters between the loom, the tools, and me. It is the materialization that accounts for the dialogue we had. On the other hand, the right pedal calls for the record of the bodily learnings that now inhabit me and turn me into a weaver. The Metatextile is the multimedia diary that synthesizes and weaves the times and knowledge produced during weaving, the same knowledge that now inhabits my body and remains in my being and becoming a weaver.
As the weft thread intertwines with each warp thread, and I learn to weave, I realize that I am not alone. Various masters I have encountered along the way participate in the process. Javier, a weaver on a floor loom for over four decades, participates. Eliana, a teacher and project director, guides me in questioning and learning about textile logic. Also participating are a series of more-than-human artifacts: the loom and tools are also present in my learning.
This project arises from the questions I ask myself while learning to weave on a manual four-harness floor loom. I explore the different languages in which we weave and examine what participates and is produced when weaving from a series of encounters with my different mentors. I seek to record and encapsulate, in a multimedia format, the knowledge produced in these encounters to ultimately create what I decide to call a conversation that accounts for what/who participated and was produced in weaving. The conversations transcend the temporal boundaries of the encounters and are composed as the final result of my learning. They serve as a means to reflect on the act of doing.
The Metatextile is a synthesis from specific records that invites human participation in this assemblage while calling for the intervention of other languages from textile logic. In the loom, the pedal and the action of stepping on it invite a frame and the threads it contains to participate. Following the same logic, this Metatextile has two pedals that call for various records housing the learnings and knowledge that turn me into a weaver, recognizing everything that participates and everything that is produced.
To the rhythm of the sound landscape constructed from the synthesis of audio recorded during each of the encounters I had with the loom and tools, the Metatextile inhabits the space accompanied by the sound of the shuttle entering and exiting and the frames rising and falling. Its composition is entirely textile: stepping on the left pedal involves the fabric produced in a series of encounters between the loom, the tools, and me. It is the materialization that accounts for the dialogue we had. On the other hand, the right pedal calls for the record of the bodily learnings that now inhabit me and turn me into a weaver. The Metatextile is the multimedia diary that synthesizes and weaves the times and knowledge produced during weaving, the same knowledge that now inhabits my body and remains in my being and becoming a weaver.
