Unruly Threads: A TXT reader

This publication unfolds an indirect conversation among colleagues; a container holding different perspectives of the current staff and guests of the TXT department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. TXT combines textile and text, interweaving the relationship between materiality and the written word. These pages give way to ten different voices on creative practice, education, activism, thought and learning tools, inspired by educator Palmer Parker’s question: how do teacher, student and subject get woven into the fabric of community that learning and living requires?

Listen, Iqra Tanveer writes: "If you enter the department at its earliest hour, you can hear the materials speak in silence; the songs of each being that are a part of this ecosystem reverberate in the space.”

Visualise knowledge through fabric metaphor, Giulia Damiani suggests. The notion (and practice) of knowledge is a knotty, messy tangle, to be unravelled.

Sink in deeper. Jasper Coppes explains that beginnings are muddy, we should want to stir the pot. “Understanding ourselves and our environment can only happen when what is repressed is allowed to surface, to be seen and heard. In mud we might finally start to take root.“ Stay in the loop. Joost Post creates an inclusive dictionary of looping.

A ‘fibrefossil’ has outdated ideas on knitting, wrongfully gender-essentialising it. ‘Knitciphergraphy’ explains; the art of encoding and decoding messages through intricate knitting patterns, combining the craft of knitting with cryptographic techniques. “Even though knitting circles remain the butt of many jokes, these spaces can have radical implications.”

These bodies of writing reveal the learning environment with its human, and more-than-human actors. Here we attempt, head of the department Mercedes Azpilicueta proposes, to embed practices of care by; doing community, cultivating the interdisciplinary and practicing performativity. 

Contributions by: Iqra Tanveer, Giulia Damiani, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Severine Amsing, Gleb(s) Maiboroda, Erik Wong, Giene Steenman, Riet Wijnen, Jasper Coppes and Joost Post.

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Specifications:
Dimensions: 20,5x14,5x1 cm
Editing: Arden Rzewnicki and the TXT department
Graphic design: Josefina Contin Zapata
Edition: 200 copies
Printer: Riso printed with no kiss?; laser printed at the Gerrit Rietvel Academie bookbinding workshop with the help of Miquel Hervás Gómez
Binding: Softcover, by Josefina Contin Zapatawith the help of Dun Lee and the TXT department
ISBN: 9789082355079
Publisher: TXT department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie; n.k.g. publications

You can pick up your copy in person at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie or choose to have it shipped. Please make your selection during checkout.

Students can buy the publication for 20 euros at the Public & Projects office.