(Un)covering the Silent (threads)
Abstract
We here think of the nuclear Family as defined by the biological Family.
Born in the West and used as a tool of oppression against indigenous ways of living and making kin, Family reproduces the values of the White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchal society* in which it was born.
Family has proven to be a failing system, beyond perpetuating the violence of its society, it has systematically carried emotional and physical violences.
Thinking of the future, what we would pass on but also what we inherited from the ones before us, we considered other ways of making kin as other ways of being. The concept of Family is at the heart of the human experience, within it we become, we learn or we lack.Reproduction and filiation are a biological and cultural given. Interestingly the way to perceive time in this assignment has been given in a scope of generations rather than years, we relate easier to the idea of great-grandparents, children, great-grand children than of the also human-made, concept of time.
How would we raise our child for another way of making society? What would our Family look like?
Early on we considered ourselves a family, with one task that started as a joke, to raise a child together. All six of us: Li, Jules, Zhiyi, Cassandre, Yosuke, Madelon, as a system of care, nutrition and kinship.
Looking inwards, into what was given to us by our Family, (fragments of those texts you can hear in the video work), we realized that in spite of growing up in very different cultures, across different parts of the globe, we shared experiences, desires and words untold.
We all spoke about love, care, presence, attention. Coming back to our children self, reflecting on the way we are now, out of our homes to imagine what we would pass on, what we would fight to change.
In every one of us, silences were woven across generations, habits and trauma were passed on. Love, care trying to be expressed, sometimes with words, often through actions, attentive ears, expectations.
How does one talk without words? What is said in silences? Questioning how to make sense of this unspoken care we arrived at our question: How do silences weave unconscious and invisible (perhaps beneficial, perhaps harmful) threads within the domestic sphere?
If the Family is living in and infiltrating all spaces it has one dedicated: the Home, a space where Family rituals happen, daily life unfolds. Home is space in a physical sense but also metaphysically, it is a feeling, a space we make for ourselves, something to come back to. Home is not a given, home is porous and sometimes in movement.
Artifacts inhabit this space, witnesses and recipients of relations. They become memories, icons, part of the Family.
Representing the domestic sphere and incarnating passages of our stories and heritage we chose to use furniture as the silent family member, archetype of the Home.
Together we crocheted around those furniture, using the thread as a symbol of the silences. Intertwining yarn we “rebuild” habits, memories, values, rules, silences adding up with time, across generations.
This moment of making was a moment of reflection, attention, care, towards what we were doing, towards each other, in silence. The objects, observers of human relations.
Together we unraveled the thread. Conscious act of choosing to no longer add on, but to see, to acknowledge and to invite, new silences, habits, to be woven again, laced with care, love and nurturing.
Title is not about healing our personal family trauma but to recognize family as a designed system that has been sustained and therefore can be changed.
Through this project we hope to invite all of us to consider family, and the nurturing of a child as the change that needs to happen. For violence to heal, towards each other and all others. *adjective coined by author, social critic, theorist, educator bell hooks Project video: https://youtu.be/0YxLDjKCiJc
