Loom Shuttles, Warpaths

Loom Shuttles, Warpaths is a collaborative research project that interweaves scientific, artistic and activist practices into a wild epistemology. The medium for this exploration: textiles and other ethnographica from the Bolivian and Peruvian Andean region, from precolumbian weavings to contemporary carneval outfits. Starting point for the trans-local transdisciplinary research is an eccentric collection assembled by Ines Doujak and Catrin Seefranz on a field trip between December 2008 and March 2009. The unauthorized, radically subjective collection composed of historical and contemporary textiles, interviews, photographs, books, newspaper clippings, audio recordings and films is the starting point for the artistic research. This peculiar artistic collection will be researched and mapped - and it will be expanded and modified by further research on related ethnographic material from two different museums: the South America Collection at the Museum für Völkerkunde (Vienna, Austria) and from the Museo Nacional de Etnografa y Folclore (La Paz, Bolivia). Affiliated with the Viennese Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) as a research site Loom Shuttles, Warpaths deals with the very particular manner in which "non- modern, indigenous wild cultures are surveyed and represented within the institutional fields of science, art and museums. Loom Shuttles, Warpaths seeks to transgress and reflect on the hierarchical binaries and the borders between disciplines which are also merely products of Eurocentric narratives and go beyond the cultural and scientific communities in forging links with further social groups and social actors, for whom the project wants to create structures to participate and intervene. These contributors will take part in the attempt that starts by looking at the ethnographic, mostly textile material that is constantly and ideologically being ethnicized und feminized to develop exemplary, alternative epistemologies and narratives. A main point of convergence for this project is a work and exhibition space, called the "Eccentric Archive, located in the heart of the 20th district in Vienna. This archive will serve as an unusual "research site" in the scientific landscape of Vienna, not only as a site for knowledge production but also as a laboratorial space of experience. We can never safely assume a certain audience will consider artistic or scientific work relevant; instead we must always actively work to create relevance. This also means developing formats for communication and mediation. Loom Shuttles, Warpaths proposes the format of a performative colloquium that will combine artistic and scientific practises. So the process of artistic research will not only be an invisible or discursive one, but will find different forms of visualization and communication. An artistic research setting that seeks to invent and try out novel forms of translating between the disciplines, medias and publics could make room for aesthetic-scientific practices to emerge, which are also capable of producing new social fantasies.

The work began with a collection of 48 Andean textiles, ancient and modern, and textile tools. These have been a perfect starting point for exploring the worldwide history and present day realities of cloth. Both its social significance and the acknowledged exceptional quality of the areas weaving techniques made it natural to bring together study and representation of cloths production, consumption, use, globalized trade and the transport that requires, and global commodity chains. These fields of study are normally kept separate. In this respect the work is exceptional. The research has been presented in a variety of exhibition spaces, conferences and articles. Its exhibition display has involved new forms of audience involvement. It has taken two main chapters, an Eccentric Archive consisting of collaged posters that are responses to items in the collection which also contain references which lead the viewer, via index posters, to four texts per poster in book form. This has required an imaginative response by curators to make the books comfortable to consult in the exhibition spaces. The texts include historical and practical descriptions of the 48 items in the collection; transcriptions of communications by other writers and artists with them; accounts of worker struggles in textile production over the last 700 years; and texts in a variety of styles on different cloths, colours and their link to colonial history. In exhibition spaces in Vienna, Riga, Malmoe, Busan, Stuttgart, Belgrade, London, and now in the 2014 Sao Paulo Biennale these have fulfilled the comprehensive nature the research aimed at and helped to established Austria as a important location in the arts based research internationally. It has also helped the study of textiles becoming part of the world of contemporary art exhibitions; applied art getting its proper recognition.This attempt at being holistic was additionally achieved by the second chapter, a Haute Couture line, in which information was inscribed in the design and production of actual cloth which also contained the patterns to produce clothes. Once again, boundaries were crossed, as the very business of fashion came into the exhibition space and could be carried out of it. In addition each of the themed cloths was accompanied by representations of the same theme in a variety of accessible media like performances, sculptures, film and booklets. Through its different manifestations the research was visualized with the aim to distribute its contents as widely as possible. The research project then, in what it has produced, has not just broken new ground in how research can be presented, but in how the presentation can be accessed.