Unruly Threads — a TXT Reader
This publication unfolds an indirect conversation among colleagues; a container holding different perspectives of the current staff and guests of the TXT department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. TXT combines textile and text, interweaving the relationship between materiality and the written word. These pages give way to ten different voices on creative practice, education, activism, thought and learning tools, inspired by educator Palmer Parker’s question: how do teacher, student and subject get woven into the fabric of community that learning and living requires?
Listen, Iqra Tanveer writes: “If you enter the department at its earliest hour, you can hear the materials speak in silence; the songs of each being that are a part of this ecosystem reverberate in the space.”
Visualise knowledge through fabric metaphor, Giulia Damiani suggests. The notion (and practice) of knowledge is a knotty, messy tangle, to be unravelled.
Sink in deeper. Jasper Coppes explains that beginnings are muddy, we should want to stir the pot. “Understanding ourselves and our environment can only happen when what is repressed is allowed to surface, to be seen and heard. In mud we might finally start to take root.“ Stay in the loop. Joost Post creates an inclusive dictionary of looping.
A ‘fibrefossil’ has outdated ideas on knitting, wrongfully gender-essentialising it. ‘Knitciphergraphy’ explains; the art of encoding and decoding messages through intricate knitting patterns, combining the craft of knitting with cryptographic techniques. “Even though knitting circles remain the butt of many jokes, these spaces can have radical implications.”
These bodies of writing reveal the learning environment with its human, and more-than-human actors. Here we attempt, head of the department Mercedes Azpilicueta proposes, to embed practices of care by; doing community, cultivating the interdisciplinary and practicing performativity.
