Under våren 2022 genomförde textilformgivaren Rosa Tolnov Clausen tillsammans konsthistorikern Daniele Burlando den första delen i sitt residens som de gör tillsammans med Lära om arkivet och Kalmar konstmuseums residensprogram Bodycake. I sitt projekt är de nyfikna på vävstugor i Småland. Genom att besöka vävstugor och prata med alla de som väver här vill de samla in och kommunicera alternativa, outtalade eller nedprioriterade historier samt reflektera över framtiden. Under våren 2023 kommer de att genomföra en andra del i projektet. Så här skriver Rosa Tolnov Clausen och Daniele Burlando själva om projektet och vad de upptäckt bland vävstugorna i Småland:
In the spring of 2022 art-historian Daniele Burlando and textile designer Rosa Tolnov Clausen visited eight hand-weaving spaces, or “vävstugor” in both rural and urban locations in the region of Småland. The purpose of the visits was to begin forming an idea of how and under what circumstances hand-weaving spaces and practices exist in the region today.
The visits particularly sparked an interest in the archives and memories of the weavers frequenting each weaving space. Most featured archives consisting of recipes for textile projects, giving insight into trends and developments of hand-weaving through time. In some cases, textiles created in the space and circumstances around their weaving had been regularly documented and described, providing insight into weaving practices in the spaces throughout time periods of various lengths.
Other documents showed weaving-related activities – for instance dying and spinning – and group travels made by the weavers, allowing the identification of weaving not only as a physically productive activity, but just as much an activity of social interaction. Furthermore, stories were told by the individual weavers, reporting family histories or personal histories, opening several possible paths for further investigation of past and present weaving geographies in the region.
About Rosa Tolnov Clausen
University of Gothenburg – Faculty of fine, performed and applied art HDK-Valand – academy of art and design Doctoral Programme in craft.
Rosa Tolnov Clausen is a textile designer and PhD researcher whose work oscillates between the fields of craft and design. Rosa creates physical spaces around the practice of hand-weaving, using the craft as a catalyst for physical, social and creative interaction, and as a pause in the contemporary urban every day. She works around notions about hand-weaving as a time- and space-consuming craft requiring high technical skill by testing new ways to approach the weaving space and the practice.
Rosa Tolnov Clausen holds a Master of Arts degree in Textile Design from Kolding School of Design, Denmark and is currently doing her PhD research at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work is characterised by textile projects in the field of hand-weaving that have strong social components, for example the co-design project H.O.W. with the weavers at Blindes Arbejde (Work by the Blind) in Denmark and the participatory installations at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul; and Fuori Salone, Milan. Rosa´s research evolves around the hand-weaving space in contemporary urban North European culture.
About Daniele Burlando
Daniele Burlando is an Italian-born, Finland-based art historian and doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on textile history and the investigation of textiles as socio-political tools.
He focuses mainly on connections between architectural and political modernism, and on the value of textiles within the processes of nation building, modernization, and social engineering in the interwar-era European context. He is also a researcher of Artek history, as well as of Italy-Finland cultural connections and exchange.
He graduated MA in 2016 from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, with a dissertation about Artek textiles. He has been employed by the Alvar Aalto Foundation in Helsinki, Finland.
Parallelly to his academic research, he also maintains a weaving practice aimed both at textile creation and experimentation, as well as at the acquisition of technical knowledge supporting his academic investigation of textile objects.
