Woven Landscapes
by Julianne Cordray
In response to a collaborative body of work by Larisa Crunţeanu and Sonja Hornung, which was exhibited in “to slip, to slide, to glitch” at alpha nova galerie futura, Berlin from June 3 – July 12, 2024. Their work and research take (post-)mining landscapes in Lusatia in East Germany and the Apuseni Mountains in Romania as a point of departure.
A fold, a wrinkle, a crease. Life lines, of sorts. Tangible reminders of movements taken and contact made, of time passed. Like the pruney skin of fingertips, describing a body’s relationship to water: a response of the system.
A watery appearance is reflected in these marks, which begin to resemble ripples in a stream of Prussian blue. Produced through movements that fold light into the surface — shifting, branching off, fading away, and starting over again. The echoes of one body as it is mapped onto another.
“a slipping across, beyond, and through the stereotypical materiality of the corpus. . . ”1
A crease in fabric is often an unwelcome presence. It is something to be removed, an instability — a mark that breaks the illusion of uniformity and smoothness. A disruption of the surface, it is a kind of glitch. Its fault lines can be felt.
Through it, as the surface is fractured into distinct parts in changing relationships to one another, interstices take shape to allow a way in, or through, opening up another space. It is by creasing and folding, after all, that the material of stories is physically transported, as objects to be held, read, immersed in.
“. . . the crease wrinkles into a non-linear narrative.”2
Creases also wrinkle into topographies: like landscapes seen in aerial view, with systems of water and land, their ridges and threads — of stories, histories, conversations. Like those that can be read in the fabric of a well-worn uniform, which, always in close proximity to the body, has learned not only to yield to it, but also to capture its repetitions and shifts.
The underlying structure of a woven textile is a grid. Using a system of coordinates, it would be possible to determine the position of each mark on its surface, the relationships between them. If you pull at the strings of its regularity, it doesn’t break but begins to warp, becomes stretched, gets skewed. The grid’s instabilities begin to accommodate new growth within its variable openings; can trace new paths along its loose, unraveling lines.
“a hole is a broken pattern”3
Visible mending is a form of repairing a textile that is intended to draw attention to itself. It’s an embellishment that lets the damage and its fixing be known. Stitching, in the form of colorful patches, or, more elaborately, like embroidered flowers, can be used for this purpose. Through it, the broken lines of the grid become amplified or, alternatively, get transformed into lush foliage. These scars are stories – felt and embodied. Bringing new life to the material, they revive what is broken by letting it remain so, refusing a return to its original state. An act of repair, but not of concealing.
“Holes are not absences, spaces where there should be something else.”4
A fold forms in solid ground. Unearthed, its veins and layers are visible as temporalities.
A landscape describes a view, a type of image, a horizontal orientation, a widened perspective. The moment of perception is what constitutes it. To landscape is a physical action: it gives shape, transforms, ornaments. Both are connected to the body, framed by its gestures and movements, while prone to continual shifts.
“. . . human bodies could well be considered a fundamental form of infrastructure. . . Bodies facilitate the smooth functioning of capitalism. . . And bodies also pose a threat, a disruptive influence, to such flows, simultaneously opening up the possibility for an expansion of emotion, sociality, care and ways of being.”5
In reflections on water, the outlines between body and space, skin and earth, are destabilized – scattering, blurring, churning. A meshing together of various fields of color. Always reorienting and reassembling. Like tessellations of flowers imposed over an irregular grid.6
The flowers and leaves slip through fingers with skin like crêpe paper. The interlaced fibers in the surface of one brush up against the other. Gauzy like a bandage, gently encouraging a motion of wrapping around. One over the other, two strands entwine into a woven body through the embeddedness and flexibility of repair.
“Over, under, over, under”7
In the subtle, frozen upward curl of a veiny, crinkly leaf, the delicate touch of a hand lingers. In the twisting and crimping of a wiry stem, the tender rubbing together of the skin of thumbs and index fingers can be felt. A landscape is immersive even when revealing its construction – when inviting us into the folds, where the seams are most visible.
“Cloths persist as records of the processes which fed into their production”. 8
As systems of fluid complexities.
From the surface of the hand, outstretched towards networks and gatherings of cloth, a landscape is formed. Followed by its inhabitants — from plants to birds, wolves and rabbits. Life is shaped by the expressive, playful flexing and bending of palms, wrists and fingers. Illusory and shapeshifting, stories take shape only to morph into others, while still bearing the traces of what came before. With each transformation, interconnections are exposed. In a series of instabilities, creases and folds assemble into an elaborate choreography.
“One, two, three. Folds, clouds, me.”9
Falling somewhere between real and representation, past and present, in an interplay of material and surface, an invitation is extended: to rethink what it means to fix a glitch. To ‘fix’, as in plant, or embed; to set like an image imprinted by sunlight.
“This glitch is a correction to the ‘machine’, and, in turn, a positive departure.”10
Like lines in skin, the crease conveys a vulnerable image of the body’s vulnerability. It holds a material memory connected to gesture – a sort of site-specific record keeping.
In the act of tending – to the landscape, to our bodies, to the archive – a certain wateriness is involved: becoming slippery, leaking, getting saturated or absorbed. Breaking with closed continuities by intermeshing what has been impressed upon the surface with what belongs to it.
A fold that forms a hollow.
A wrinkle that deepens with time.
A crease that becomes a passage.
“. . .intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are. . . full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations. . .”11
Vessels for many-layered, kaleidoscopic wanderings.
Notes:
1 Legacy Russell, “Elsewhere, After the Flood: Glitch Feminism and the Genesis of Glitch Body Politic” in rhizome, 2013-03-12: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/mar/12/glitch-body-politic/
2 Maria Gil Ulldemolins and Kris Pint, “Crease” in Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 17(2022), No.1, pp. 61-98.
3 In reference to Anna Neumann, time, care, fragility, impermanence, Burg Giebichenstein, Halle (Saale), 2023.
4 Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, Fourth Estate, London, 1997, pp: 57.
5 Alex Loftus, Department of Geography, King’s College London, UK. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 2021, Vol. 4(3) 799–817.
6 Marjorie Rice was an amateur mathematician who discovered new pentagonal tilings, which she also used as networks over which to impose intricate designs of animal and plant motifs that emphasized the tiles’ transformations and different orientations. See: Schattschneider, D. (2017). Marjorie Rice (16 February 1923–2 July 2017). Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 12(1), 51–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513472.2017.1399680
7 In reference to Anna Neumann, time, care, fragility, impermanence, Burg Giebichenstein, Halle (Saale), 2023.
8 Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, Fourth Estate, London, 1997: pp. 66: https://monoskop.org/images/1/17/Plant_Sadie_Zeros_and_Ones_Digital_Women_and_the_New_Technoculture_1997.pdf
9 From the video work by Larisa Crunţeanu and Sonja Hornung, featured in To slip, to slide, to glitch.
10 Legacy Russell, “Elsewhere, After the Flood: Glitch Feminism and the Genesis of Glitch Body Politic” in rhizome, 2013-03-12: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/mar/12/glitch-body-politic/
11 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ignota, 2019 (first published 1988): pp. 35.
References:
Ellen Sampson, “Creases, Crumples, and Folds”, The Fashion Studies Journal, adapted from the author’s doctoral research (RCA, 2016): https://www.fashionstudiesjournal.org/2-visual-essays-2/2017/4/2/creases-crumples-and-folds-maps-of-experience-and-manifestations-of-wear