2025 - 2026 FACTORY student led: Tracing visceral beliefs ~ Embodied cloth-making
As our bodies live in different states of agency, viscerally and imagistically connected to place, histories and futures. I would like to welcome you in the conception of a visualising or mapping practice of how a reclamation of power or self-determination can look like as a felt experience in the body.
How can we think along our own bodies in the dimensions of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, however as Fanon would argue not as neutral psychoanalytic categories but as sites where colonial history and racial power are inscribed into embodiment itself?
I would like to welcome you in the shaping of this practice. For now it look like embodiment practices, melting fabrics together, pattern making and different ways of tracing embodied shapes.
I will bring with me dimensions of embodiment from dance practices, tracing paper, markers, a heat gun, organza and other fabrics.
As the practice is still shaping for now I pose the question: what happens if we think of clothes as a language that emerges from aesthetics and so can suspend or maybe even resist symbolic realities. If our aesthetics emerges from the lived experience of our bodies.
In this factory I would like to investigate this practice as a form of dress-/cloth-making/ materialisation and a way of thinking what aesthetics desires we keep alive inside us.
I propose the factory consisting of several iterations, following:
Tracing lived experience:
- Pattern-making
- Fabric dying
- Reflecting aesthetic desires
NOVEMBER 24, 2025
The emergence of shapes
Led by Josse Vessies
When: 20:30 - 22:30
Location: Yoga Room (ground floor)
The first session will be focused around tracing embodied experiences and the emergence of shapes.