What the hand remembers

From a historical perspective, textiles are an omnipresent material, viewed by anthropologists as a blueprint of society, providing insights into the technological, political, and social progress of the respective times. Textiles and their production have always been at the center of society. The loom, as a hyperindustrial machine with deep roots in the colonial past of the West, embedded in the cycle of capitalist value production, offers potential not in inventing new tools and production techniques, but rather in expanding approaches, questioning the loom as a “timeless” machine amidst anti-modern degeneration processes and decomposition of traditional patterns and forms of learned and known. In the process of expansion, I strive for a method of unlearning and relearning, of writing and erasing, of weaving and unraveling. In the series What the hand remembers (2024), a processual working through takes center stage; in the weaving process, I intervene in the AI-generated image file and disrupt the machine-controlled process by reversing, unraveling, and interweaving my own patterns by suspending automated procedures. Perceived technical errors creep into the process, halt, fray, expand, take shape in the process of unlearning and relearning craft techniques. Within this ongoing series, I aim to question weaving as an aesthetic deviance procedure with (un)certain outcomes and to further fray textile forms.