a heavy, heavy, duty is a textile-fiction in the form of an installation that merges strands of global cotton production with the omnipresence of synthetic and chemical substances. The work creates a science fiction landscape in which fertilizer, dry ice and hormone preparations produce, optimize, devitalize, cure bodies – or are getting incorporated as means of resistance. „We want to stay with the trouble, and the only way we know to do that is in generative joy, terror and collective thinking.“
Stefanie Knobel and Angela Wittwer began their collaboration in Northern Iran this summer with collective imagination and writing processes. What developed out of this were 8 text figures in the form of audio loops which can be listened to at Les Complices*.
Among the text figures the installation assembles sound recordings of and with textiles interconnecting them with a selection of lists, historical references, interviews and legends: of the cotton producing Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, of farmers and cotton activist from Nagpur, India, of disused textile factories at Zurich Oberland and of the first industrial spinning frame „Spinning Jenny“. A future timeline of a heavy, heavy duty lets resonate past with the present and opens a remembering actualisation of the colonial entanglements of Switzerland in the frame of an expanded textile history.
On November 17 and on Dezember 3 a textile-disco will take place as part of the exhibition: In the rhythms of textile-sounds and looms of Lodikeda, Santipur and Neuthal we are inviting you to create our own version of the „Spinning Jenny“.
On November 22 a textile walk through the Trümplerareal in Uster will take place. in 1832 the Trümplerareal in Uster became the showplace of the Usterbrand, where homeworkers and manufacturers revolted against the mechanisation of spinning and weaving. The Trümpleararal today is an studio and office area.
10.11., 7 pm
Opening
17.11., 6 pm
Discussion with the artists and guests, at 9 pm textile-disco
22.11., 6 pm
Textile walk
03.12., 7 pm Closing, 21 - 22.30 pm textildisco
We hope to see you there!
Angela, Stefanie, Gökçe, Martina, Les Complices*
Quote from Donna Haraway: Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chtulucene.
a heavy, heavy duty is part of the series Substances that in 2017 and at Helmhaus Zurich will be continued by Stefanie Knobel with oh my silly, silly, silly mind.
