Wild Fibres Commoning: Twisting cords of belonging

From Firenze University Press Journal: Fashion Highlight

Venohr Dagmar, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg

WILD FIBRE COMMONS — TEXTILE ACTIVITIES PRODUCE RESISTANCE

For my research, wild fibres are a sign of a common, still loose and at the same time designable textile connection between humans and other than human worlds. How can their transformative power be recognised? — Over the last three years, I have constantly come across wild plants and people who approach them differently. I experience it as an ongoing process of growing community in the sense of actively spreading a mindful and knowledgeable practice in working with wild fibre plants that are easily accessible. I see commoning as an activity that enables, creates and maintains vital relationships between me and other worlds. I look critically and angrily at the increasing capitalisation of common goods and am convinced that the value of these commons cannot be understood in terms of so-called goods but rather as ways of acting. With Silvia Federici (2016) I think, “if commoning has any meaning, it must be the production of ourselves as a common subject” (p. 386). Throughout these connecting encounters, activities and exchanges around wild fibre occurrences, extraction and processing, I am slowly getting an idea of what it might mean to practice a subjectification process that is common to all. The performativity (Barad, 2003) of wild fibres functions for me here on the one hand as a vivid symbol for my abstract, rather philosophically conceptualising thinking, and on the other hand conceptualising thinking, and on the other hand as a concrete action and transformative manner to handle everyday fibre material honorably (Kimmerer, 2013).In a joint conversation, the textile artist Alice Fox called it silent activism. Grateful for this formulation, which I already appreciate in Fiona Hackney’s work (2013), I would like to add a certain defiant resistance. Contrary to general expectation, my sensory attention is directed towards the seemingly insignificant, the incidental or the disruptive, the permanent vibrating material presence (Bennett, 2010) of wild fibres. Full of joy, I perceive a kind of cosmological murmur (Stengers, 2005) and increasingly see fibres and cord in everything that encompasses me. Nettle fibres, for example, can be easily tapped with bare hands and twisted into strong cord. In no time at all wild and prickly bramble vines are transformed into sturdy ropes that can carry us. The immeasurable variety of wild fibres becomes more obvious to me every day: the tattered tree bark on the asphalt, the fine strands of algae collected at the Baltic Sea, the fine threads surrounding my freshly harvested corn, the floating seeds of the thistle, the little hairy clouds left behind by the daily wandering dike sheep, the remains of your pullover on my lint brush, the woolly mice under our bed .I twist threads out of everything that connects me — with places, things, people and more than human beings, my Mitwelt, the world as the epitome of the co-living.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/fh-2922

Read Full Text: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/fh/article/view/2922