Ambiguous Stitches

Participatory Textile Making at Trapholt Museum

Resumé

This article investigates how Trapholt Museum’s collaborative craft-based practice, and more specifically the embroidery project Data Mirror, engages with, explores, and revitalises textile craft as an ambiguous cultural practice by navigating between tradition and innovation, and individual and collective creativity. First, we analyse how Data Mirror draws on and unsettles cultural positions of textile tradition and renewal by both paying tribute to a traditional textile craft and combining it with contemporary societal issues and untraditional dogmas. Second, we show how the participatory design unsettles conventional contradictions between individual and collective practice by harnessing textile-making’s community-building affordances while at the same time allowing for individual expression.

Accordingly, we argue that Data Mirror composes and brings the diachronic and synchronic cultural ambiguities of textile craft into play in interesting and often productive ways. These ambiguities unsettle conventional dichotomies and uncover new potentials in and between these. The participants may prefer either tradition or renewal in their embroideries, and either individuality or collectivity in the process, but they will necessarily relate to both in Trapholt’s projects. In line with Hartmut Rosa’s point that resonance requires not sameness but difference and sometimes contradictions, we argue that textile ambiguities like the ones in Trapholt’s projects can be a productive fuel for (re)connecting and resonating with the world.