Podcasts
Needling the system: knitting and resistance.
Kirsty Robertson University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
This podcast is intended for educational use only.
This paper takes up the topic of protest and knitting, unraveling one section of an intricate web of global relations and antagonisms. While the act of knitting might, at first glance (or touch), seem to have little to do with the circulations of capital and bodies in the current system, I suggest that the work of a number of textile artists, activists and scholars offers an embodied critique of globalization that riffs off more traditional protest, incorporating and embedding both the technologies of virtual space and the very real materiality of the body. Focusing on the network of Revolutionary Knitting Circles, as well as the work of a number of contemporary artists, I examine knitting, an activity traditionally thought of as domestic, feminine, and lacking use connection outside of and against the globalization of capital and far removed from the typical image of the violent and black-clad male anarchist protester. Revolutionary Knitters, I suggest, challenge and extend the means through which representations of the global justice movement are generally filtered – whether through the mainstream media, the internet or even word of mouth. Pushing these ideas further, I hone in on recent work done by a number of artists/activists that uses textiles specifically to communicate oppositional messages, for example, by transforming the language of binary code of computer viruses (and other illegal information) into the stitches of knitting. In doing so, the artists and activists discussed stretch metaphors of linkage through virtual and real projects, and through the careful (inter)weaving of collaborative work, connections through the world to other craft-workers and anti-sweatshop activists, and metaphors of both the global justice movement and the internet as "webs" of interwoven ideas.---
L'auteure explore le tricot en tant que language de protestation à l'échelle mondial, par des artistes du textile ainsi que par des activists. Elle fait particulièrement reference au groupe appellé "Revolutionary Knitting Circles" (les Cercles de Tricot Revolutionnaires).