UNCRAFTING WORTH

May 2022 | ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem

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Welcome to this space.
I am a body.
I am a body amongst bodies.
I am a crafting body before you.
I am a body crafting with you,
And together, I hope that we may reach opacity.

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Uncrafting Worth is a durational and nomadic artistic research investigation regarding the worth of the female crafter’s body, the craft object she produces, and her crafting process. There has rarely been a time where one’s gender, sex, race, ability, sexuality, and class has not affected one’s placement in the world.

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Women, those identifying as female, and those labelled female by others, have long been subjected to the invisible domestic space to perform women’s work, or paraded in the visible space as sexualised objects; placements deeply interwoven with a prescribed worth.

Edouard Glissant’s term ‘opacity’ examines worth by understanding another through difference. Opacity does not see through bodies by reducing them to personal definitions and understandings, but accepts the multiple unknowabilities of the other and the self.

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Today, yesterday and tomorrow, I invite you to see the opaque body before you, to see your own opaque body, and to see the opacity of all bodies around you.

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A few more notes:

The crafting before you has been taking shape since 07:00 this morning, moving through various public spaces.

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The knitted piece before you materialised through a month-long, hour-a-day

knitting practice that began on 19 April 2022.

The dark green yarn before you took its form in a spinning mill in Sweden in February 2022.

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supervisor: Fenia Kotsopoulou

external Mentor: Casey Jenkins Sh

invigilator: Kadri Sirel

documenters: Fenia Kotsopoulou, Zuza Sosnowska and Stelio Troullikas