panel 12Textiles and Textures of Care
Clothes as Interfaces: Aesthetics of Care for the Dressed Body
Fiona Capdevila Cugat
Critical food cultures have evolved making us more conscious of the vital implications of nourishment. As food, clothes are materials that don’t belong to our bodies. These materials are extracted from their original environments or bodies by means of violence and abuse. As we dress ourselves every morning, we are undressing someone other’s skin. Acknowledging these fluxes of materials in and out our bodies can shift our perception of clothes as aesthetical, ethical, ecological, and political interfaces connecting us to the living spaces.
Clothes are important for health. As an emotional and physical need, clothes set us up for performance making us be ready, while taking care of our intimate spaces of vulnerability. This always happens in concrete places, facilitating a sense of being in the world in a way, or facilitating a sense of nested experience. Therefore, clothing is an interface that provides multidimensional relationships between our bodies and many physical and subtle territories. Despite it, eco-feminist literature has missed the agency of dress to enlarge our deep sense of related wellbeing.
The fashion system, as the current main source of clothing, needs us buying all the time, hiding the amount of life that this huge industry burns. Still, we can release from the fashion dictatorship of trends, bargains, and beauty standards if we formulate the right questions: How do clothes provide me a sense of relatedness with the worlds I want to inhabit? How can we regenerate the imagination of our bodies in performance? Rather than being impoverished and tasteless consumers of global degradation, how can we build meaningful aesthetics connected to our intuition? As fast fashion is the paradigm of alienated aesthetics, clothes as interfaces is a critical frame to cultivate collective and individual healthy aesthetics of care.
My name is Fiona Capdevila Cugat, PhD researcher in Contemporary Aesthetics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona / Eina. I am a creative individual interested in design for social transformation and the power of art to stir consciences. Currently, I’m researching the conceptual decomposition of fashion and the emergence of other ways of understanding the clothed body also beyond fashion studies and sustainability, inspired by relational, ecofeminist, and decolonial perspectives. In my current artistic research, I am stepping out of my comfort zone, which used to be the atelier, to produce audio files with narratives, interventions in public space, and an interest for a space in between workshops, performances, and conferences. I am committed to exploring ways to tie the broken bonds between culture and nature.
I have researched the women who worked in mythical haute couture ateliers such as Balenciaga and Pertegaz, making the documentary Sense tocar la roba (2015) together with Rosa Solano, which gathers the voice of the invisible hands that produced the amazing haute couture garments. We have exhibited in museums such as the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museoa and won the IV Casa Elizalde Visual Arts grant, Galeria Setba and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Vilanova I la Geltrú. In 2002, I founded Del Través / Alchemia Textile, a personal project focused on the aim of rediscovering the value of discarded textile materials and the scalability of their reuse through design strategies. Even earlier, I studied and worked in theatre as set designer and costume designer.
Collective Textile Art as a Tool for Culture of Care Co-Creation
Daniela Castilho Duarte
Textile art has been used as a tool for women's political vindication in different historical periods, and in many of these movements, it has been a collective practice. Since the late twentieth century, and as a part of the feminist movements that sought to revalorize textile arts and crafts, many textile art collectives related to urban art and artistic activism emerged. Based on observation and participation in some of these collectives, like groups of collective embroidery, or Tornen les Esquelles collective, a group creates felt pieces and participatory actions with local raw materials from Barcelona region, this research aims to analyze how textile art acquires a meaning of vindication and repair of spaces by women, and how this collective practice becomes a tool of care at various levels.
Using art collectives as objects of study, and the theoretical referents of “the politics of care” (The Care Manifesto, 2020), the “cultural politics of emotion” (Ahmed, 2015), “Useful Art” (Tania Bruguera, 2011), interspecies cooperation (Haraway, 2019), and “caring democracy” (Tronto, 2013), collective textile art is investigated as a practice of mutual care among participants, as the generation of communities of care and practices of collective care at a distance, and also as a form of what Tronto defines as “caring with,” a mobilization with the objective of transforming the world. Currently, most of the publications on textile art related to activism are based on personal accounts or artistic exhibitions, thus, this research can contribute to the existing literature as an academic reflection on the subject, apart from being a new reflection on the relationship between collective textile art and the culture of care.
Daniela Castilho Duarte (Belo Horizonte, Brasil, 1981) graduated in Social Communication (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil) and in Fashion Design (UNA, Brazil). She also holds Master’s degrees in Textile and Surface Design (IED, Madrid) and in Art and Design Research (EINA/UAB, Barcelona) with the research Entrelazadas: Textile Artivism, Political Claim and Mutual Care. She is currently a doctoral student in Philosophy at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in the line of research Contemporary Aesthetics, where she continues her research on contemporary textile art and the insertion of textiles in urban movements of feminist political vindication. She also has her own artistic practice in tapestry, embroidery, and other forms of experimentation with textiles.
Journeying with Kala: Reclaiming Interdependencies of Material, Land, and Maker in Shaping Textile Practices and Aesthetics
Mithila Mohan
The current models of large-scale industrial production have been a determinant of the cultivation and manufacturing practices of cotton in India, significantly contributing to the present-day climate crisis. Cotton has become synonymous with unsustainable farming, land degradation, and pesticide dependencies. The literature review and fieldwork in Kutch, a small region in west India, threads together the history of Indian cotton, the consequences of colonialism and industrialization that irrevocably changed its narrative, and the present-day realities of the crop.
In this practice-led research, an old-world indigenous plant, Kala Cotton, which grows in the plains of Kutch, becomes the practitioner's companion in unraveling the interdependencies of the land, the material, and the maker, which are fostered in traditional textile practices. In contrast to the industrial practices that separate plants from their land and makers, the world of Kala Cotton is intricately connected to local communities, from her cultivation to her spinning and weaving.
The traditional practices of spinning and weaving with Kala lays the ground for understanding the role of materials in the act of making. The practices with Kala are contextualized through Ingold’s (2010, 2013) concept of correspondences. In a reciprocal dialogue, practitioners follow their materials, attending to their stories and properties alike, influencing and shaping the practice and ultimately the artefacts. Through correspondences with Kala in making, the article further explores Saito’s (2020) aesthetics of care, which arises from understanding Kala in her wholeness and particularities; her history, her present, and her intricacies with her land and her people. Through the story and textile practices related to Kala, the paper proposes how understanding materials in their interconnectedness with land and communities can shape the narrative and practices related to them and lead to an aesthetic engagement rooted in care.
Mithila Mohan is a textile designer and doctoral researcher working in two research groups, Multifunction Materials Design and Fashion Textile Futures, at Aalto University, Finland. Her work ranges from exploring cultural and traditional practices of weaving with natural fibers to multidisciplinary collaborations for developing environmentally responsive woven fabrics integrated with novel smart materials. In her practice-led doctoral research on natural fibers, she explores the relationships between land-based practices and craft through traditional forms of weaving and spinning. The foundation of her work is built on the connections between traditional ecological knowledge, material agencies, and aesthetic engagements that are fostered in textile practices. Mithila’s work emphasizes the entanglements of material, land, and maker in informing the direction of making and aesthetic qualities of woven textiles.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman