notes from a resilients residency

Coralie Stalberg, April - May 2012

“Débrouillardise et Coquetterie” is a project on DIY textile practices and associated recycling strategies during a historical period characterized by a radical scarcity of material resources — the Second World War and the years right after the war. In the context of research for a resilient future that would be more sensitive and committed to sustainability, it’s quite possible that the inventive solutions imagined by all kinds of people for coping with resource shortages in their everyday realities during the war period can be inspiring for us now, and constitute a playful toolbox to experiment with…

D&C consists in an ongoing registration and documentation process of the WWII textile DIY practices and the narratives around them, mainly through fieldwork in Senior meeting places and elderly houses. The collected material will be hosted in a living archive.

I am further interested to generate contexts for creative re-enactments and playful re-interpretation of those resilient practices in our contemporary context, through workshops bringing together elderly and kids/teenagers. I would love to see in these temporarly constitued collectives gathered around this shared practices ‘emerging community of resilient cultural workers’. I wish hereby to activate and investigate ways for intergenerational transfert of knowledge, skills and imaginaries, and see how active forms of relating to the past can contribute to a ‘theory of cultural Resilience’, seen as a challenge to rethink the invention of the cultural and the political.

Methodology / theoretical part : at the crossroad of History, Ethnography and Textile Conservation.Underlined Text

- HistoryUnderlined Text, in a Microhistory approach (‘search for large answers in small places’), also Altagsgeschichte (history from ‘below’)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microhistory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alltagsgeschichte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_School

An inspiring text from Dominique Veillon : http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/spip.php%3Farticle240&lang=fr.html

« Longtemps, les documents écrits ont seuls eu droit au statut d'archives, à cause du support palpable et de la trace visible qu'ils laissaient, permettant l'administration de la preuve. Le chercheur pouvait les compulser à loisir, légitimer son travail en alignant les références. Rien de tel pour l'oral, dont le côté éphémère et fragile réduisait à néant les espoirs d'accéder à une conservation dans son intégrité. Jusqu'à une date récente, en l'absence de magnétophone, on transcrivait en les résumant, les résultats d'une conversation ou d'une interview. Dès lors, aux yeux de l'histoire positiviste, l'enquête orale restait “annexe”, voire pour les plus sceptiques, un objet fabriqué de toutes pièces pour les besoins de la recherche»

-AnthropologyUnderlined Text :

°Experimental Ethnography : http://www.osea-cite.org/history/exp_ethnography.php

- Experimental ethnography locates the value of the anthropological intervention, however, not in the teleology of the objectified results (e.g., social change, policy/political action, or cultural revitalization), but in the process and, thus, valorizes the actual dynamics of fieldwork as the primary locus where the “real-world” relevance and significance are to be measured, evaluated, and appreciated. »

-Fieldwork practices are being “recombined” to explore their utility in the recirculation of given knowledge in a relevant manner by the very activity of the exploratory bricolage.

-Bricolage of fieldwork in which concepts, methods, techniques from various fields of art (scenography, museumography, art installation, performance arts) are recombined with the inherited methodologies of anthropology.

°Anthropology of tranmission / Generational Anthropology

Transmission is a topic of crucial importance for anthropologists. However few are the studies which make transmission their focal point, a subject for and in itself. In this paper I show how cases of transmission haunt the very foundations of our discipline and how they lie at the back of such notions as memory, re-invention and continuity. I conclude by asking how we can study ethnographically the fleeting reality that is the act of transmission. David Berliner – Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains.

http://www.cairn.info/revue-terrain-2010-2-page-4.htm

° Anthropology of cloth Underlined Text

« Pour une anthropologie du vêtement » Yves Delaporte, CNRS/Musée de l’Homme http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/03/57/95/PDF/Delaporte_1981_MNHN.pdf

«Le vêtement est l'instrument de la dignité de l'homme et le symbole de sa fonction humaine »
André LEROI-GOURHAN http://www.bergpublishers.com/?tabid=524 Link to Fashion Theory, the Journal of Dress, Body and Culture.

°My own ‘bricolage’ : In search of an incarnated practice of anthropology : a Poetical Ethnography inspired by the gestures, tools and strategies of Textile Conservation,Underlined Text as a textured and concrete way of touching the past (object).

Out of my desire to collect stories as precious fabrics….