notes from a resilients residency

Coralie Stalberg, April - May 2012

PRESENTATION

“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.

- History, 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»

-Anthropology: °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

« 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, as a textured and concrete way of touching the past (object).

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

The most important thing that my journey through textile conservation brought me is a deepening of the understanding of the ethical dimension of my practice, throughout the whole process of the fieldwork (from the encounter to the collecting of the story - of the constitution of a living archive of stories - to the transmission of the past story and their transformation by younger generations)

                  Some Notes on my personal methodological approach:
                  

For ‘Débrouillardise et Coquetterie’ I want to hybridize my ‘ethnographical – encounter’ practice with tools from textile conservation.

At the core of my ethnographical practice lies LISTENING to the other, as a receiving and a taking care of its story. Hosting the story in my dilated present.

Somewhere in between ethics and Sensoriality/Sensuality.

Textile is for me intimately related to touching, I like touching with closed eyes. Feeling softness, rugosity, holes, threads.

As listening with the closed eyes is every time again a beautiful and deep sensorial experience.

Receiving the voices of my interviewees as a precious gift, enjoying soft, slow, fast, textured voices.

Textile pieces and threads came up as ‘CONCRETE’ METAPHORS for the sensations i like to focus on when I interview and listen.

Deepening the experience of touching a textile, learning the words, concepts and parameters used to analyze a piece of cloth would allows to receive more complex insights in the textures of voices given to me during the process, by analogy-thinking.

Textile conservation came up as the most complete approach to analyze textile in depth, its fascinating multidisciplinarity : in between chemistry , biology, art history, craft…A lifelong learning process…

If the operating concepts of textile conservation seduced me to apply them on the sensorial level of the voices of my interviewees, it now interest me in the context of D&C to apply them on the story as such. On the very words of the story to be preserved, on how the words are sewen together in sentences, on the narrative structure of the story as a whole.

Textile conservation also attrackts me as a discipline:

Because it is a lived, bodily practice to focus on minutiae – as this focus is also central to my practice of ethnography.

The infinite pleasure I have of focussing on « little » things, I am curious to apply them through textile conservation exercices.

« Little » things are disscrete and apparently insignificant thruths, that I search for in my ethnographical explorations. ;

Values of the conservator that I admire: -Sticking to the concrete -Taking utmost care of the piece you are in charge of -Humility in the presence of the object -Respect of the integrity of the object -Develop a deep affinity with the object -Commitment to extremely slow processes -Accept that after the short moment of excitement you will commit to a long time of routine tasks, you will be bored. -Minutiae /Precision of craftmanship.

The textile conservator is constantly involved in finding out all kind of strategies : conservation is about inventing ways of handling difficult objects. Your ability to handle difficult situation in everyday life will help you a lot, they say in the guide for textile conservation!

I became more and more curious to apply metaphorically the tools for conserving pieces of cloth on micro-narratives from the past.

FINDINGS:

The Nature of the piece of textile is of fundamental influence on what can be at best done to preserve it. This rules inspires me ver much… but which words to define the nature of a story ?

Tex Conservation nations that are ‘operative’ or applying them on ‘narratives’ :

Texture of the piece of cloth : its fabric and structure.

Characteristics : Loose patterns Zig Zag Patterns Unevenness in tension Missing parts Schilferend Scheuren Extreme cases of total fragmentation

Qualities: Extensibility Elastic limit Flexibility Density

Folds

Size – weight – complexity

Fragile zones

How much repair needed ? How much alteration has bien carried out ?

The irreductible individuality of the story.

Actions / Performatives:

-cleaning (I don’t like the ideo of ‘cleaning’ a story though)

-sewing (steunweefsel naaien) : the stories I collect from elderly spontenously receives ‘steunweefsels’ from helping people surrounding, for example from other pensionees, or from their children that actively support them in the process of remembering,reactivating by details the flow of the story, filling the holes, proposing corrections or other interpretations, raising questions, identifying contaminations from remebrances from other epochs (fusion of timelines).

-To raise the piece of cloth/ to raise the story -To cover the piece of cloth/ To cover the story -Framing, positioning the piece of cloth/ the story -Unroll the cloth/ the story

Pinning : involves making holes, or having marks that tends to remain

Transfer to other contexts : the fragile condition of the story that is being displaced

Unprotected condition of the released object/story

What does this displacement of concept from the conrete realm of the cloth pieces to the immaterial realm of the words and narratives mean to me, and what does they mean to you ?

IN TEX CONSERVATIONS AND IN MY ETHNOGRAHICAL ENDEAVOURS, WE BOTH WORK WITH OBJECTS/STORIES AT RISK.

At risk of dissapearing.

Decaying is part of their very essence.

The responsability of our disciplines is to slow down these built in process of decay.