A Woven Conversation

For Disc Journal’s second issue, which centers on the theme of “intimacy,” M_A reconvened the participants of “Threads: A conversation about textiles in art and architecture,” a program that complemented Figure’s Veil Craft. Ahree Lee, Casey Baden, Current Interests, Felecia Davis, Figure, and Minga Opazo—individuals and practices committed to woven, soft, tactile material—returned to record answers to five questions about their work with particular attention to their intimate dimensions.

Read about our contributors here.

Disc explores the entanglements between architecture, media, and technology. Each issue has a different theme, form, and design. Disc is editorially independent and para-institutional.

Could you describe how you explore and interrogate intimacy in its various forms by way of introducing your practice/projects with textiles?

"The inspiration stemmed from something closer to home."
Figure
"The intimacy that I've been thinking about has to do with the closeness of knowledge."
Felecia Davis
"I'm interested in embodying and inhabiting."
Casey Baden
"Maybe we can think about textiles as becoming systems of refusal."
Current Interests
"My data points capture human memories, emotions, and experience
Ahree Lee
"You can see marks of human intimacy and I use it."
Minga Opazo

Architecture and textiles shelter and dress the human body as protection and as a signifier and are thus tightly bound with feelings of comfort and formations of identity. How do your projects relate and respond to the body, the senses, how we communicate, and how we move through the world?

"Textiles, especially at this time, represent a form of direct protection."
Figure
"Since we industrialized textiles, we no longer see the human labor anymore."
Minga Opazo
"Privacy and intimacy are not the same."
Felecia Davis
"We like to think about how the hand and body become folded into the workings of systems."
Current Interests
"Recruiters looked for skills like knitting."
Ahree Lee
"How do we merge with one another?"
Casey Baden

One associates textiles with their tactility and softness. How does working with textiles prompt a reconsideration of architecture, typically considered to be more permanent and rigid? And vice versa, how does your practice destabilize assumptions about textiles? 

"What you touch changes you, and you change it."
Felecia Davis
"Building systems rely so much on soft systems."
Current Interests
"I've been exploring the interplay of function and form by teaching myself double weave."
Ahree Lee
"The home is an architecture full of textiles."
Casey Baden
"There are different types of assumptions when you see my work."
Minga Opazo
"We had to change the way that we thought about how things come together."
Figure

Producing and manipulating fiber and fabric requires intense and intricate labor that historically has been gendered, marginalized, and invisibilized. Yet textiles are materials that record labor rather legibly (in the weave, stitch, etc.). How do you negotiate these histories and how do you approach craft and labor as they relate to the medium?

"There's a necessary slowness as well as a condition of collectivity."
Current Interests
"Nothing brings labor practice and textile work to the foreground as much as making a prototype."
Felecia Davis
"A lot of my activity doesn't fall neatly into one category but overlaps a couple."
Ahree Lee
"We are so disconnected from this craft, we don't recognize the labor that goes into garments."
Minga Opazo

And lastly, in the spirit of creating new intimacies, can you share some other practices, texts, scholars, scientists, etc. that you look to and think/create with?

"I do think my work is inherently feminine and I don't shy away from that."
Casey Baden
"Giving a drawing set to a contractor instead became a very fluid process."
Figure
"Her future feels real because it embeds this past and it's terrifying and scary."
Felecia Davis
"I wove my first iteration of a textile motherboard there, and I found an amazing community."
Ahree Lee
"This is going to be a lot..."
Casey Baden
"In the broader material world, there are so many things to just look at and reconsider."
Figure
"I would like to recognize her as a scholar scientist that is really making an impact in LA."
Minga Opazo
"We look at his work really, really carefully."
Current Interests