MIND FABRIC Talk by Joke Robaard

Saturday 26 March 2016 
16:00 h

TALK by Joke Robaard in 
A.VE.NU.DE.JET.TE - Institut de Carton vzw
 

SOCIAL = FABRIC

  

Why are these nouns in particular, “fabric” and “network”, so ubiquitous today? In countless fashion articles, political speeches and urban development meetings, these two cosmopolitan concepts are in perpetual flight through different domains, refusing to settle in any one. "Fabric" has also frequently  been qualified by the adverb "social". Addressing the urgency of this so-called social fabric, politicians, urban developers and sociologists expressed their concern for coherence, to those alliances apparently forsaken in the 20th century.

Although the vocabulary of textiles may tap into a collective memory of connected matter, ideally this knotted network offers ways of thinking that are more flatly pragmatic. How to convincingly and consistently grasp the material consequences of textile metaphors? In language we pretend to execute a material act; in reality we execute a technological instruction. Somewhere between fabricated language and real fabric there’s a tear, a hole; yet this “distressed” gap is actually desirable. The gap, in fact, is a perfect place for testing the consequences of literary and concrete matter. (J.Robaard, Serving Library Issue #6, 2014)

Joke Robaard is beeldend kunstenaar/onderzoeker en docent aan de Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (afdeling TXT). Op dit moment toont ze samen met Camiel van Winkel de installatie Assemblage in Het Nieuwe Instituut te Rotterdam. Binnen het kader van Edition VI, Event and Duration, georganiseerd door IfIcantdance, Amsterdam ontwikkelt zij het project Replacing Magical Images (nov.2016)

A.VE.NU.DE.JET.TE - Institut de Carton vzw
Jetselaan 41 - Avenue de Jette 41
1081 Brussels
(Metro Simonis, 10 minutes walk)