Gloria Sogl ~ Tactile Kinship. Between states of becoming and processes of unmaking
Gloria Sogl's "Tactile Kinship. Between states of becoming and processes of unmaking" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 3, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.
Here you will find the documentation of Gloria Sogl's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.
Tactile Kinship. Between states of becoming and processes of unmaking
Gloria Sogl's question: What weave if remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp?
Gloria's introduction: Undoing the distinctions between hobbyist and fine art, and the categorizations of “high” and “low,” textile praxis transcends thresholds between hand and machine, between becoming and unmaking. The loom, as a hyper-industrial machine with deep roots in the colonial past of the West, embedded in the cycle of capitalist value production, invites us not to invent new tools but to expand our approaches, question the loom as a timeless machine amidst the decomposition of traditional patterns and forms of learned and known.
By emphasizing touch and materiality, we draw insights from sensory narratives, embodied experiences, and intuition, reflecting the diverse ways we, both individually and collectively, acquire knowledge and understanding. This performance highlights the interplay between states of becoming and processes of unmaking, illustrating the intertwined nature of textiles and text. Fraying threads become braided voices forming collective writing, as weaving becomes an aesthetic process with uncertain outcomes, further unraveling traditional textile forms.
Bethany's report: The space is filled with a large printed fabric hanging from ceiling to floor, displaying duplicated images of hands and faces. Balls of yarn scatter the floor, while poles with hanging threads function as provisional looms, marking points for weaving. As the audience enters, they are surrounded by these makeshift looms and seated in the space. A series of performers pick up the poles of the looms and walk backward, stretching threads across the room to form a web of connection that fills the space with lines of tension.
The artist invites the audience to gather around or lie beneath the stretched lines of yarn, encouraging them to get comfortable and look upward at the woven materials. As they settle, the artist reads from a text, guiding them into a sensory experience. They are invited to engage with their hands, to feel the texture of the wool and threads, and to notice sensations like warmth, roughness, and softness. The artist prompts them to pick up a loose thread from the floor, asking them to reflect on their own personal entanglements and the stories that each thread might carry.
As the audience holds the threads, they are encouraged to reflect on their connections, histories, and entangled relationships. The sounds of a loom periodically punctuate the space, reinforcing the rhythmic and meditative nature of the act. Slowly, the audience begins to weave the threads together, interacting with the makeshift looms and one another, entwining yarn to create a shared tapestry.
Through this invitation, the audience is not only asked to participate but also to consider how they might actively shape the patterns they weave. They are encouraged to move beyond passive interaction, reflecting on how each thread carries its own story and how weaving can be both an act of preservation and transformation. They are given the freedom to form or break patterns, emphasizing the agency each participant has in shaping the evolving structure.
This act of collaborative weaving becomes a tactile metaphor for interwoven lives, shared histories, and the power of collective memory. Each thread holds a story, and as audience members intertwine their threads, they symbolically participate in a process of collective remembrance and connection. Through this shared activity, the presentation invites participants to consider how personal and collective identities are woven together, creating a fabric that is both fragile and resilient. Together, they create a living tapestry that is not static but dynamic, relational, and collectively generated.
Antonia Majaca: Antonia begins by underlining two questions from Gloria’s performance. The first question she highlights is, “How do you anticipate your body responding when liberated from the time-consuming demands of production?” She connects this question to the previous performance they saw in the same space and to what they are collectively experiencing in the present moment. She observes that they are all being extremely productive, pushing themselves to the limits, which she feels is creating different forms of “breaking.”
Antonia reflects on the pressures of optimization in the environment they’re in, noting that this context is not immune to those pressures. She jokes about the moments between activities, even “the minutes between spaces” where one has to hold in the urge to pause, mentioning that she’s “not saying that’s from a personal experience, but I am as well.” She feels they are all under pressure to perform constantly, to the point of breaking.
Antonia then suggests reframing the question: not only thinking about how bodies would respond if liberated from the demands of production, but also considering how minds, souls, spirits, and “forms of communion” might respond. She connects this to Bataille’s idea of “community without community,” which, in her view, is the only kind of community worth belonging to.
The second question Antonia emphasizes is, “Have you considered how to participate in the abundant forms of affection and relationality?” She explains that this question is significant to her personally, and she believes it resonates with others in the room. She notes that they often don’t allow themselves enough time to find the tools to grieve their own traumas and sufferings. Everyone, she says, is working with the tools they have at different moments along their journeys.
Inti Guerrero: Inti begins by thanking the artist for the collective weaving experience. He shares that his interest in textiles is both personal and related to his professional engagement with visual art and creative practices. Over the past ten years, largely through his partner, he has been learning from textiles, collecting them, and gaining an understanding of the technology around them.
He explains that in certain types of weaving, such as Ikat weaving in the Philippines, the process is incredibly precise, almost scientific—like a computerized system that determines exactly when to create a specific color at a particular moment along the thread. Inti reflects on how, in colonized and colonial art histories, textiles have often been relegated to the world of “craft” due to the misogynistic framework of art history, which has traditionally excluded textiles from the category of “fine art.” Since textiles have historically been created predominantly by women, they have been categorized as vernacular or craft rather than art. He notes that while there have been moments in art history, particularly in the field of fabric arts, that have acknowledged textiles, this recognition is often limited to modernist female artists in the Global North.
However, Inti clarifies that this performance is speaking to a much longer and deeper tradition of textile work, one that exists beyond fabric arts as defined by modernist art history. He emphasizes that textiles hold layers of history and biographies of the people who made them. He describes how we are all “historical bodies” carrying personal and collective traumas, which manifest in different ways and can also be expressed through textiles. For him, there is something inherently exorcistic in creating a collective piece, a process of stitching or weaving together that brings about healing.
He points to the AIDS Memorial Quilt as an example of this collective healing, where thousands of family members and loved ones stitched together a huge quilt, creating an immense moment of collective mourning and remembrance. Inti also mentions Filipino artist David Medalla, who created participatory works in which audience members were invited to stitch different objects and patterns onto cloth, transforming the artwork into a collective exorcism.
Reflecting on the misogynistic language of art history, which relegates textile work to the field of craft, Inti appreciates the presence of women’s images in the fabric hanging in the performance space. He feels there is an honoring of the women behind the tradition of textile creation, reclaiming their work as art and recognizing its historical and cultural significance.
Ramon Amaro: Ramon begins by thanking Gloria for the experience and shares his excitement about this renewed focus on weaving and textiles in contemporary art, as Inti mentioned. He appreciates the nuanced ways artists, including Gloria, are thinking about these materials. For him, the use of fabric that is inherently “unfinished” creates a sense of constant return, a cycle of getting back to origins. He sees this “contemporary wave,” if it can be called that, as moving away from the finality of finished fabric and into something that functions more as praxis, an ongoing, active process.
He shares an example of his friend, Amsterdam-based artist Aurelian Lapetit, who weaves his sleep data into fabric. Due to sleep issues, Aurelian participated in a sleep study and began weaving this data into textiles, mixing it with metallics to create new conversations. Ramon sees this work as part of a larger coherence in the collective movement of textile arts, and he finds it an exciting moment he doesn’t want to miss.
Ramon highlights a passage from Gloria’s text that describes the weaver’s hands in “constant fluid motion” as they lift heddles, throw the shuttle, and beat the weft. He finds this poetic description beautiful, capturing the rhythm of balancing strength and sensitivity in each motion. Observing the participation in Gloria’s weaving process, he’s reminded of Heidegger’s concepts of “present-at-hand” and “readiness-to-hand.” Present-at-hand treats everything in our environment as a tool for human use—an extractive approach. In contrast, readiness-to-hand allows objects to communicate with the body and the social environment, ready to be activated through interaction. Ramon feels that Gloria’s performance embodies this latter concept, where objects are animated by the communal experience.
He then draws a connection to Deleuze, particularly from The War Machine, where Deleuze discusses the distinction between the tool and the weapon and how repurposing a tool decodes and reinterprets its meaning. Ramon sees this process in Gloria’s work, where knots are not just points of tension to be released but instead form a “collective body” that represents the communal act of weaving.
This leads him to think about Audre Lorde’s concept of “sitting with the anger.” Ramon wonders, what if the knot in Gloria’s work symbolizes this anger? He imagines the knot as a way for people to come together, to sit in one room and practice together, allowing the knots to express themselves through emotions and behaviors. He finds himself questioning what might happen if Gloria attempted to “unravel” these knots and sees this as an exciting potential for future exploration.
Ramon agrees with Inti’s comment about the history of textiles, where there is often a sense of finality or completion. He appreciates how Gloria’s work challenges this idea, turning what might traditionally be seen as errors or entropy into catalysts for new possibilities. He’s curious about what might come next, feeling that this moment in Gloria’s practice is open-ended and full of potential.
He closes by reflecting on the nature of community, saying that true community is defined by what it cannot be—it cannot be reduced to a sequence of problems with a single solution, nor turned into an algorithm or protocol. For Ramon, community is something that is known only once it is encountered. He sees this as the kind of community Gloria’s work aims to weave—a community that unravels and redefines itself continually, not constrained by fixed identities or histories, but open to new ways of being together.
About: Gloria Sogl
Gloria Sogl's "Tactile Kinship. Between states of becoming and processes of unmaking" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 3th.
Find the overview of all 38 AEROPONIC ACTS 2024 here: Chameleon Orbit
