Fabrics
Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez
NE-LV You have talked about the idea of ‘open source’ in the context of weaving. Weaving is a binary code – warp and weft – which implies integrating an experience into an expanded conversation. It is also a universal code that records multiple happenings, develops ideas and conveys stories and moods, permitting both intimate and collective moments. The act of weaving is continually renewed and expanded, thereby generating other stories, landscapes and memories. The code is at the service of the collective, in which techne shows its importance. It is not about following the code, but about exploring its possibilities while integrating and broadening its limits.
TL I am interested in weaving as a technique, an ancestral technique that magnificently simplifies binary code, a system through which we recognise the world and shape our thoughts. I don’t know enough to be able to say whether the discovery of binary code was inevitable or whether it was a human decision that structured thought, and it could have developed differently. Does it reflect what already exists or does it create it? I have always been interested in human creation, which is why I’m so fascinated by binary code which is, ultimately, an open-source code. I fell captive to weaving too because of its hypnotic motion and its hold on time, and I did so totally and utterly, beyond results and consequences. In return, it has helped me penetrate unitary time, an expanded time that suffuses life and daily routines – a complete time, if you will. Weaving is a structural process that enables the simultaneous creation of language and object. It is a form of ‘speech’, but, above all, it is the human revelation of an arcanum.
NE-LV This constant work on the woven cloth as a universal code produces a split intimacy: ‘personal’ on the one hand, because of its connection to a living tradition that identifies with certain ways of thinking, living, loving and dying; and ‘cosmic’ on the other, because, as the philosopher Yuk Hui observes, every technique implies a cosmotechnics, understood as ‘the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making’.1 Beyond a necessary functional aesthetic, weavings have a symbolic-expressive purpose and are therefore also carriers of memory. As you have often said, exploring primeval techniques connects us with the universe. It is the opposite of the notion of progress, which connects different historical eras and ways of life on a single spatio-temporal axis.
TL Weaving turned my attention away from the more groundbreaking art forms that dominated the early seventies, such as Conceptual Art. I appreciated how far-reaching the proposals of Conceptual Art were, especially in Catalonia, but I wanted to be elsewhere. Weaving raised other issues. And it was something people did all over the world and across all eras; it was collective and popular. I was quite sure I wouldn’t find any answers in the art of those years.
I talked about this in my first-ever piece of writing, La alfombra rusa, in 1982: the so-called ‘international art’ didn’t belong to everyone – at least it didn’t belong in the Barrio Chino, it didn’t belong to the beggars or to El Vaquilla. I’ve been in homes of the gauche divine – I would go with the gitanos when they’d been invited to sing – now that was truly international.
NE-LV Landscape is the first thing one recognises on a formal level in the works presented in this chapter. But, as you were saying, you also appear to incorporate a geometry that crosses different geographies and ways of doing: from British Op Art to the anonymous art of Berber women. It’s as if by just looking at the technique and materials you use in your structures of repetition – wool, cotton, viscose, jute and taffeta – one could almost put together a brief biography. Of course, paper is also an element of editing and assemblage. How did these materials make their way into your biography, into your life experience?
TL I didn’t focus on landscapes at first, only technique – pure, undiluted technique: one thread yes, one thread no. That’s the easiest way to weave without forcing a result. Horizontals and diagonals are easy to do. I began with this and then moved on to triangles. Triangles are familiar, universal shapes and immediately recognised as ornamentation. That’s why Bridget Riley triumphed with her geometries in the sixties: because everyone saw themselves in them. I went on to weave landscapes because I wanted the technique to respond as a medium and not serve itself, but that didn’t last long because when I focused on technique – in Marina (1983), Bonaire 46 (1983) and Bigna Kouni (1984), for example – I felt free. My contribution consisted in reaffirming what already existed: materials, traditions and techniques.
NE-LV The philosopher Isabelle Stengers talks of the ‘art of paying attention’, and indeed the type of gaze you describe is certainly attentive: it transcends the regime of judgement and accommodates the ‘other’ in quite a rare way, especially in the eighties when, as you say, the focus was elsewhere. This gaze, in contrast, sees weaving as a way of inhabiting the world and expanding time. We would like to reflect on this economy of attention of Stengers, as well as on the poetic economy defended by Jean-François Chevrier, which, like Filigrana’s observation, rejects the accumulation-capital binomial.2 We find echoes of this deceleration in your approach to collaboration and teaching, two key aspects of your work. How do you think your attention has changed over the years, especially when screens seem to absorb all forms of curiosity?
TL A long time ago, in La Palma, I wrote that ‘life is rather like staring at something you can barely see’. Weaving permits a hypnotic gaze. Time is dilated, suspended, ecstatic. I compare it to prayer. We have lost prayer; we have ceased to believe. When I see someone deep in prayer, I feel a certain yearning. But I’m not a believer, and since I don’t believe, I can’t pray, practise yoga or meditate, but repetitive actions like weaving do come close to prayer.
Weaving is a form of meditation because it is a repetitive technique. And progress is so slow it frees up space in your head. I think that’s where the difference lies with respect to the economies of attention we get with technology. The act of weaving allows our thoughts to wander away from the specific and become diluted.
NE-LV We might say that it’s this dilution that opens up the imagination, whereas with the sort of concentration we get from screens, the path to imagination is in danger of narrowing. Apart from the suffixes, ‘ritual’ and ‘virtual’ share an ability to hone the senses.