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The future is hand-woven: Contextile 2024 – Contemporary Textile Art Biennial

Someone once pointed the following: fabrics are the skin of the earth. When all is said and done, be it cotton, silk, linen or wool, fabric derives from nature, a true child of it. It has been argued that one is an extension of the other, a nurturing and protective nature that we acknowledge in both, which are our support and sustenance. A bond is forged between textiles and the earth, emphasising the need to uphold and respect the environment. Like human skin, this fabric varies enormously in texture, colour and endurance, each telling a tale of genes, cultures and affections.

Guimarães is once again the epicentre of contemporary textile art in 2024, with a new edition of the Contextile biennial. Together with conferences, workshops and exhibitions, including one by the guest country Canada, the featured artist Josep Grau-Garriga, the international exhibition, artist residencies and national school initiatives, the event is a vast weaving of stories, intentions and knowledge. Artists from all over the world are called upon to tap into the essence of fabric not just as a material, but as a language. The outcome is a convergence of patterns, formats and tonalities, all of which bear different timelines; with each piece an artery of the memories and ways that started it, honed by the modernity of the act and its thinking power, and an understanding of the hurdles on the horizon.

Contextile’s seventh edition is intended to be a platform for reflection on the legacy, sustainability and future of textiles. Taking the concept of ‘Touch’ as a starting point, the discussion covers the challenges of living in a networked world. This intricate existential tapestry, whose everyday threads are interwoven and twisted into new forms of normality, is a great occasion to ponder the relationship between textiles and touch. The world is growing densely woven by technology and our identity is based on machines and machine-made memories, with no regard for the physicality of things. “We fall in love with new technologies, not only because machines have enhanced and multi-layered senses (they see and hear ‘better’, are faster, stronger, etc.), but because they control our memories and emotions”[1]. As spectators of our own lives, touch is becoming weaker as cybernetic realities and artificial intelligence become increasingly widespread. As well as isolation, the eagerness for progress and the ambition for higher productivity levels foster the manufacture of synthetic materials and digital fabrics that alter and/or diminish the depth and authenticity of the tactile experience. Function is destroying the sensory.

Imagine the ancient weavers with skilled and erudite hands, who went beyond the object to hold in the fibres everything that is nameless and formless. At such moments, the touch and the recorded memory of the hands’ movement turn into a devout gesture, in intimate communion with the material world. But this sacred bond is gradually being lost in the shift from textiles to the ephemeral, in the race towards the digital and the yet-to-be-invented. We have forgotten that touch sparks human relationships and our involvement with the world. Ultimately, what have we lost already by pursuing the abstract?

In this era’s panoptic context, between the discreet, the dangerous and the quintessential, ‘it is important to connect communities and territories of textile culture…’, point out Cláudia Melo and Janis Jefferies, curators of the international exhibition. There is an urgent need to reconsider the sense of touch, to reinvent it so that it withstands and asserts itself at this crossroads of realities: the history of individual analogue knowledge and the creative unpredictability of collective technological expertise.

The international exhibition, the biennale’s solar area, where 57 works by 50 artists are dedicated to touch in different ways, is one of the many approaches on show. Names such as the Frenchman Arnaud Cohen, or the multidisciplinary Hungarian artistic duo Judit Eszter Kárpáti and Esteban de la Torre, explore the junction between craft tradition and technological innovation. Cohen combines an eighteenth-century Belgian tapestry with AI-generated images in Winter Over Europe 7, Circe, stressing the contrast between material and computational. Hidden amongst the lines is the portrayal of an episode from Ulysses‘ odyssey, a hint given to us in the title, a direct reference to the sorceress in the epic who transforms Ulysses’ crew into easily manipulated pigs. The metaphor is a glimpse into the present and the reality of being alienated by the digital world, acting on us like a drug – pawns who are dependent and isolated. Dung Dkar Cloak, an interactive installation, is a hybrid textile, able to unfold matter in the visual and sonic realms. A multi-sensory experience in which the visitor’s contact with fractal patterns woven in jacquard is soundtracked in real time, generating a live musical according to the combination of touch and its absence, as well as the depth of this gesture. The algorithmic thinking behind both works attests to the opportunities and aesthetics of augmented multisensory textiles as a means of contributing to the understanding and development of new interaction methods.~

Fabric became a form of resistance in the hands of artists like Palestinian Lara Salous and Ghanaian Frederick Bamfo. The former’s installation What Remains challenges the power of the symbol by studying the interaction between time, material, labour and the signs contained in hujrah, the Palestinian rug traditionally woven by villagers and Bedouin women. Defying the immortality of the object, whose existence of memories and identities goes beyond physicality, the carpet which literally unravels itself here echoes the deconstruction of the gesture behind it, of the unchanging nature of space and time. What does it mean to be? When does one stop to be? The latter, with the Floating House installation, materialises the transformation of textile waste into new possibilities, reminding us of the huge landfill of used clothes in that country. This allegory is an opportunity to reimagine the future of fashion and industrial textile production.

Other pieces, like those by Nikos Iosif, Juliana Ribeiro or Niina Hiltunen, adopt materiality and illuminate a world between the past and the future, a tangible one, brimming with comfort and craftsmanship, but also memory. Others delve into the history of the world or of a particular population, such as Nita Monteiro’s Serpente da Vida or Colectivo Confundamiento’s Interactive Sensory Travel Gallery. Another standout is the duality between the stiffness and fragility of textiles, a relationship of protection and vulnerability seen in Anna Ill’s Embracing Limits and Weaving Horizons, both of which elicit a tension reverberating with ephemerality.

Apart from this area, there is also a merger of eclectic and experimental languages from the main national schools with textile technique subjects, as well as an exhibition of eleven invited Canadian artists, confirming the plastic potential of textiles to overcome the boundaries of the visual arts, fine arts and handicraft, resulting in cross-disciplinary practices and techniques that align traditional thought and gesture with contemporary concepts.

Finally, Josep Grau-Garriga’s appearance at Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães and his solo exhibition Los Hilos de la Memoria, featuring works made between 1972 and 2000, is particularly special. In his words, if clothes are our second skin and the only one we can choose, then each piece has lived our lives and acquired our style. We experience and communicate through our bodies, clothes and the textiles covering them, with the latter retaining memories of what has been and what is to come. Drawing on the artist’s idiosyncratic talent for transgressing and expanding the conventional aspects of tapestry, these works metamorphose the flat and the limited into an overflowing sculptural presence, whose sheer scale invites the audience into an intimate and individualised immersion in every material nuance. This experience is contemplative, between the tangible and the abstract, the enduring and the fleeting. We navigate through Temps tendre, Record d’infância and the call for innocence and fragility, visceral experiences reflecting the beauty and nostalgia of the past. The pieces contain memory and time elements, somewhere between the past and the present. Hores de Ilum i de focar addresses the duality between illumination and concentration, a possible call for personal reflection on our own experiences of clarity and dispersion. From a historical and political perspective, Vell estendard d’aquí and Monument a l’anarquia clash against each other. The first installation, instilling a connection to local history and traditions, embodies the celebration of cultural identity and dares us to consider the evolution of cultural symbols. The second, a reflection of the artist’s own personal involvement with the anarchist movement, echoes in the materials used, a powerful visual metaphor for the complexity of this philosophy: the quest for freedom, justice and alternative social structures. This constellation also meditates on the fleeting quality of memory – Llum de febrer and Diàleg de llum – and the strength that comes from its transformation – Anne Frank.

Contextile 2024 – Contemporary Textile Art Biennial will be in Guimarães until December 15. A manifesto against the desensitisation of today’s world which, through textiles and touch, encourages us to rediscover the meaning of being human today.

 

[1] Dyens, Ollivier. (2001). Metal and Flesh. The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. Leonardo Books.

Master in Curatorial Studies from the University of Coimbra, and with a degree in Photography from the Portuguese Institute of Photography in Porto, and in Cultural Planning and Management, Mafalda develops her work in the areas of production, communication and activation, within the scope of Photography Festivals and Visual Arts - Encontros da Imagem, in Braga (Portugal) and Fotofestiwal, in Lodz (Poland). She also collaborated with Porto / Post / Doc: Film & Media Festival and Curtas Vila do Conde-Festival Internacional de Cinema. In 2020, and she was one of those responsible for the curatorial project of the exhibition “AEIOU: Os Espacialistas em Pro (ex)cess”, developed at Colégio das Artes, University of Coimbra. As a photographer, she was involved in laboratory projects of analogue photography and educational programs for Silverlab (Porto) and Passos Audiovisuais Associação Cultural (Braga), while dedicating herself to photography in a professional format or, spontaneously, in personal projects.

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