2015 » Norway » Student Section

Warped Threads

Politics

The Warped Threads project is a collaboration between three students from Nepal, Germany and the U.S., currently studying in Norway. Our project started by exploring the boundaries of countries and the imagined boundaries that we live with. These boundaries are defined by our personal and social spaces. The pathways and barriers between these spaces formed the subject of our project. We explore this theme through the meeting-point of textile and installational set design. We discovered that these tensions influence what we wear on our bodies; clothing is a force that unites and separates us, a billboard of our times.

“As clothing wears, fades, stains and stretches, it becomes an intimate record of our physical presence.” – Derick Melander

We began our exploration of politics and space with a map. Drawing lines between the countries we have lived in or visited, we began to recognize the complexity of feeling and experience woven into our lives separately, and collectively as a team. Each of us has a different identity, but we are now connected by one goal. Two costume designers, one from Germany, one from the USA, and a set designer from Nepal. How do we spin together the dangling ends of the threads and create a connection to each other? This question subconsciously formed the basis of our communicative process, and emerged as the substance of our exposition.

Our interest in connections is twofold; first, the complexity and subjectivity of personal national identification. Second, the broader social identity and 'sense' of a nation, and the potential difference between native and alien perspectives. We discovered that our experiences of personal space and national space are spun together with our impressions of landscape, travel, friendship and severed by miscommunication and conflict.

The physical representation of this process resulted in the creation of textile pieces representing our different impressions of culture, and connecting these sections with string, to sculpt a route suggesting a path of interaction to the audience. The strings crossing the space represent connections in our personal histories of travel. In reality, the physical presence of strings in this space interrupts the free flow of movement through the space. Although the original idea is to represent connection, the web redirects the path of one who enters – this is a manifestation of the idea that our intention to communicate can form barriers when translated into a new context, as we experience in a new culture.

The textile pieces have multi-dimensions. Material and form each have their meaning. The material is clothing – we are interested in the semantics of what individuals and societies chose to wear. We looked at national costumes from different regions, as well as photographs of modern individuals who combine objects and fabric in a manner that reflects the political and economic climate of the nations they live in. This inspired us to 'dress the room' in a manner that reflected our team's nationalities and the conflicts and connections between them. The techniques that inspire us are middle Eastern carpets, European tapestries, American patchwork quilts, and the human and earth landscape of nations (massive crowds of pedestrians or military or religious groups, national gatherings, Norwegian fjords, the Arizona Desert, the Nepalese Himalayas, German countryside).

We believe that the partitioned and multisensory space we are sculpting agrees with the attitude of the PQ's statement on politics where Aby Cohen writes that: "The divisibility of the space is certainly a political attitude that conveys different trajectories, full of intentions and running many directions". This is an apt description of both our multifaceted national backgrounds and our incorporation of a myriad of experiences in a space that divides, guides, and ultimately connects a diversity of intentions.