Don’t buy the hours
Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez.
NE-LV In your work two ideas stand out in particular. One is that of labour: of approaching work from the perspective of a technique and a time traditionally associated with women and in direct opposition to Fordism. In other words, more than productivity, it’s about how to turn working time into a space for enjoyment, into an intimate space of one’s own. And the other idea, inspired by the anonymous lineages of women weavers, is that performativity is durational – and you felt this at a time, the seventies, when happenings and performances were leading to the dematerialisation of art. Nonetheless, you defined your relationship with action and performativity through flamenco, tours and street life. Working and performative experiences transcend the materiality of an object, which is why we can consider weaving from a choreographic point of view too.
TL All action is subject to time. Weaving requires a time that extends into everyday life. In this sense, I think that a beautiful rug should be considered as a unit of time and not reduced to a tally of the hours it took to make or a commodity. A rug is conceived and experienced well beyond the hours it has been on the loom. To buy hours is to steal a time that belongs to us, and this is especially so now that tourism has caught the consumerist bug. Weaving means a slowness of action, a recognition by the conscious body of learnt motions that happen by themselves: a repetition of gestures by a choreographic body that leads to a state of introspection and cogitation that doesn’t have to be productive.
I discovered a counterpoint to this activity in the voice: in the late nineties I produced short spontaneous oral pieces that gave rise to the text Adiós al rombo. Rosas blancas (Farewell to the Rhombus. White Roses). And I recently recorded some audios based on stories about the Raval.
NE-LV The subject of creative technique leads us to the woven fabrics of the Middle Atlas, which you discovered though books and via the Dutch traveller Bert Flint, a great admirer of Moroccan culture. It was during this long initiation that your idea of weaving as an open code intensified, as did your criticism of the West’s unfair treatment of the ornamental arts as lesser arts, which opened your eyes to the impossibility of maintaining an ancestral art within the capitalist system, where the abstraction of money, the measurement of time, the exploitation of resources, cheap labour and the extraction of raw materials have combined to bring about the disappearance of so many cosmotechnics. You began what we might call, with the perspective of time, an investigation into the weavings of the Berber women of the Middle Atlas.
TL I met Bert in 1982. I was interested in his rug collection, so I sent him a letter with photographs of my weavings, and he immediately responded with a telegram: ‘Letter coming.’ In it he said that he wasn’t so familiar with the technical aspects and invited me to be his travel mate, but it had to be just us, as he feared we would be distracted by other people with other interests. I had no idea who he was or what he did for a living, and he didn’t know me. We travelled extensively and it was great fun. We realised we were made for each other: we had the same obsessions and fears, the same passions. Bert wanted to know who made these objects he loved so much and so, with him, many doors were opened. People would laugh at us because when we asked who had made such and such a piece, the men would say, ‘Women’, and so Bert would say, ‘Well, let’s get the women here, and we will pay them!’ Happenings and laughter combined. He wouldn’t pay the men, although I suspect the money changed hands once we’d left. I recount some of these experiences in White Roses (p. 181) and Estampas marruecas, and he wrote a text too (p. 161), in which his love for this land really comes through.
NE-LV What especially drew you to weaving was its materiality, its structure, and its ability to narrate something, more than its feminist connection. Bert Flint was interested by how it translated ancestral forms. As Europeans, you both found a way of exploring a class of beauty that was not recognised as such, as an ornamental beauty. In general, Europeans didn’t think weaving was on a par with painting, and locals didn’t claim the legacy of a tradition they considered outdated.
TL Bert’s museum in Marrakesh, Tiskiwin, arose precisely out of the desire to make this legacy visible. Bert’s entire collection is in it, the work of a lifetime spent in pursuit of an idea outside the canon, which was to show the art in the craftsmanship, tradition and ornamentation of the territories bordering the Sahara. His museum shows the Saharan diaspora and Morocco’s ‘African root’, aspects highlighted today by authorities such as Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (who writes in this publication, p. 111), Grada Kilomba, and Ibrahim Mahama, who spread these roots into other continents and cultures – like those who arrive apparently with nothing.
NE-LV After those trips and still in the Middle Atlas, you began work on various pieces that would later form a corpus of work and be shown in three exhibitions: La alfombra roja (1989), Tejidos marroquíes (2000) and Adiós al rombo (2016). In acknowledgement of an incredibly rich tradition, you always take as your starting point an original Middle Atlas weave. The women weavers already translated the technique – what you set out to do is to show, as they did, that it is possible to expand a tradition and create a language of one’s own.
TL In the mid-1980s I started my project on the Middle Atlas weavings. I decided intuitively that I was going to develop it in three phases and that the original fabric would be the guide and nexus to the textile tradition. In other words, a traditional weaving of my choice would direct my work, and both pieces would be shown together in exhibitions and in publications. These intuitive ideas have produced a theoretical development far more fruitful than I could ever have imagined: immersion into an uninherited textile tradition.
The first exhibition, La alfombra roja, was held at the Museu Tèxtil i d’Indumentària in Barcelona in 1989. I focused on void as opposed to complex ornamentation. Void allows motifs to be seen in isolation, in contrast with the originals where what prevails are the relationships established by the net-like pattern. I chose eminently textile drawings. The second exhibition, Tejidos marroquíes, was held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and at the Ville des Arts in Rabat, in 2000. The originals, loaned from the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, the Louvre and the Bert Flint collection, were exhibited in the same museum as Guernica – after all, they are extraordinary and contemporaneous with Picasso. My work mirrored the format of the handiras, cushions and hanbels. In the third, Adiós al rombo, shown at La Casa Encendida in Madrid and at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao, in 2016, and at the Venice Biennale in 2017, I said goodbye to the image... but then people appeared, and with them invitations and collaborations that have given rise to several shared authorship projects.
Bert Flint and Teresa Lanceta, Marrakech, 1999.