textîles

[…] Travelling across alternate timelines, while certainly possible, and even easily achieved, is certain to have serious consequences for the travellers, as well as the timelines. Neurochemical changes as well as molecular shifts in metabolism have been frequently observed, and are today associated with reported altered states of consciousness that characterize experiences of this kind [For further information on the risks of transtemporal travel, see sections 2.3-2.7]. To avoid these risks, transdimensional holographic telepresence (THT) remains the most common research approach to the exploration of alternate timelines. Allowing the researchers’ bodies to remain safely within their continuum, THT minimizes the chances of cataclysmic events, physical injuries, and anomalies, by instead opening an holographic window onto other timelines. […]

The digital project textîles – threading speculative archipelagoes makes landfall at FRACTO 2021 as a performative space where facts and fictions about textile artefacts and practices can be reclaimed from an archipelago of alternate worlds, and spun anew. This is an invitation to navigate fragments of their-stories in multiple timescapes, by collectively pulling narrative threads and following their imprints on the fabrics of the possible.

textîles approaches akin forms of creative (re)appropriation – weaving timelines, crossing archives, engaging with speculative fiction and worlding – while also taking critical and radical stances on predatory appropriation, extractivism, dispossession and restitution.

Inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, textîles gathers non-hero stories, stitching “footnotes” back into historiographic fabrics as a method for collective memory-making. Meant as a way to unweave and reweave the relational knots of multiple events, time- and landscapes, the project pays attention to the response-ability inherent to the work of threading stories. Choosing the threads is a powerful matter indeed.

textîles are: Filippo Bertoni, Alice Cannavà, Chiara Garbellotto, Sybille Neumeyer

visual/ design: formphase.