Patterns In Resistance (Kunsthalle Amsterdam)

2020

Series of four online comissions with Kunsthalle Amsterdam and Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. Part of Alt_Cph 20.

A series of four online commissions exploring the relationships between technological, cultural and planetary ecologies, colonial histories and feminist practices. Patterns in Resistance weaves connections between old and new technologies based on historical 'women's practices', such as weaving, crocheting and basket making and their relationship to contemporary digital technologies. The commissions thinks about technologies as historically situated practices of work and survival, care and storytelling.

Amalie Smith’s ‘Fabric of the Digital’ explores the history, labor, ethics and aesthetics of weaving in relation to the digital through 15 images and short texts about Ada Lovelace, early computer chips, Grace Hopper and more. Raisa Kabir’s ‘Materialising Textile Labour: Embodied Geographies of Weaving’ looks to the body, weaving technology, racialised labour and global textiles to tell a story of planetary interconnection and inequality. Both commissions can be seen on Instagram.

‘Everyone Does A Hell of A Lot Of A Lot Of Noodling Maintenance Work’ is a co-written essay with Sanneke Huisman of LIMA about maintenance and care in the work of Mierle Laderman Ukules, Martine Neddam and Ulises Carrión and Olia Lialina.

‘Soundings’ by Romi Morrison and Loren Britton is a bookmarklet for your toolbar and an invitation for you to willfully interrupt your web browsing, and to slow down. It is a moment to let the noise of constant-attention-turbo-capitalism fade into the background with recitation of poems by Black Feminist poets & scholars: Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and invite you to read some lines from Claudia Rankine. The project asks us to consider how fully you can feel in your daily doings, how the erotic is a well of everyday affirmation, how the power of naming the feeling allows for power to transform whats is possible, and that "wanting to want to" is reason enough.

Kindly funded by the Stimuleringsfonds.