We began this brief by having to solve some riddles to find it. The brief itself was a mark left in the world for us to find, in the form of a QR code, which was a nice introduction.
Guy Debord
I have no idea what to do for this brief. I know that I don't want to have any environmental impact during this brief. even though it would be a really small one. Another thing is that I haven't figured out yet what exactly I want to say by leaving a mark. I was initially thinking of negative things to emphasise, but I think in a public setting a positive message tends to be more efficient. I thought about the birds foundation we briefly worked on for Alpkit. In their study, they talked about small positive activism, where they get people to engage more deeply with a topic, in this case nature, to naturally become more interested in it without actually pushing that on them. I think I would also have to do something similar to that, but put into a visual, to be able to reach any people.
Doing the suggested reading made me quite depressed. I agree with most stuff said, such as the fact that even if we are aware of it, we cannot escape 'the spectacle'. Moreover, I feel like it's difficult to put out a message into the world since I believe that people are barely, if ever, influenced by things they see but do not experience, and that people tend to use most things they see to reinforce their preformed world view.
Marks in the world
Yarn Bombing
"I find the medium of knitted textiles a powerful tool for expression and communication because of the cultural preconceptions surrounding the area. It is a “friendly” medium, which can be used to engage your audience with a subject, which might otherwise cause them to turn away." - Freddie Robins
Yarn grafitti involves attaching handmade yarn itmes to strret fixtures and leaving them there. Yarnbombing can be done with different motivations in mid, a lot of the times it is simply meant to spread jpy or decporate a space, one of the original purposes being reclaiming sterile public places ion a fun way. For a lot of people grafitti can have some negative connotations, which yarnbombing does not reallly possses yet, due to it being less prevalent and more easily removable, it becomes very non-offensive (usually).
Yarn crafts also have a history of bein tied together with femuinist activism. Making textiles was heavily associated with domestic work, so yarn graffiti is, for many, an act to rebell against that by instilling the fact that knitting is an artistic act trough crafting public inmstallations.
Theresa Honeywell makes use of the femininity that is associated with knitting and juxtaposes it with traditionally masculine objects like power tools.
Cat Mezza is an artist who explores the overlap between textyiles, technology and labour. She founded Microrevolt projectss, which is a web-based project whose goal is to "investigate the dawn of sweatshops in early industrial capitalism to inform the current crisis of global expansion and the feminization of labour"
The Revolutionary Knitting Circle (RKC) is another group which promotes social change by using knitted items to challenge the idea that protests are violent.
“Unraveling” opened on March 19, 2022 at Gavlak, Los Angeles.
"The exhibition is a rumination about the time we live in and how we got here. There are aspects of this show that are relatively personal and others that are much broader, but my hope is that even the more personal aspects will resonate with viewers." - Lisa Anne Auerbach
Freddie Robins uses knitting as a medium to 'distrupt the notion of the medium being passive and benign'.
Knitted house of crime - These are the homes of female killers or the houses where they committed their crimes.
"Last year my parents-in-law found a young, female woodpecker lying dead in an empty bedroom. It had pecked at it’s own reflection and at the wood veneer of the dressing table mirror, dying from exhaustion and hunger. Some years earlier a young woman had fallen from the roof terrace of the flat above ours, landing in front of our basement door. She died on impact."
Skin- a good thing to live in
Although yarn bombing is easy to remove, I am still concerned with the small environmental impact of the work.
