MUTEK presents an international audiovisual creation contest as part of the 18th edition of its festival. Participants were asked to produce an original audiovisual composition that could not exceed 3 minutes. The jury chose the 5 finalists that are now submitted to a public vote for the Public Choice Prize, open from June 14 at noon until August 29 at noon.
Lea Schwarz presents her video work, The Grid, as one of the chosen five finalists.
View the video here, which features a collaborative electronic textile work by Lea Schwarz and Ryth Kesselring.
The Grid
From the extraction of elements, the chemistry, the factory and the production of an object; the performance that a material can take before we see it in its final product can be as extense as we can dig. The Grid searches to enlarge the space that a single object can occupy by zooming into machines and structures designed to serve a specific task in the world of textile production. This footage, mostly taken from my weaving processes, takes the example of a woven textile -the essential composition of the grid- to make a bigger references to the control of man over nature and the creation of bigger systems. The human capability/desire to control and organize material, to striate spaces. Looking through the lens of the text “Smooth and Striated” by Deleuze & Guattari, The Grid uses textile as a metaphor for labour, industrialization, resource exploitation, and population growth. In this case I refer to nylon (plastic), a human created compound that does not exist in nature itself, it is an element created by humans to feed our needs. It once projected hope and now is one of the biggest threats to planet earth, changing its configuration forever. This is the space of a dialogue where smooth space is constantly being translated into striate space and striated space is constantly being reversed into a smooth space.
textiles + materiality research cluster 