The Flesh of History – Re-Enlivening the History of Textile Industries Through the Work of Kristina Müntzing

Abstract

Swedish artist Kristina Müntzing physically engages with archives of textile industries through manipulating, enlarging, fragmenting and re-constructing (re-weaving) photographs that she finds, as well as creating performances that explore the carnal aspects of this history. In this way, she makes connections between such embodied understandings and the political struggles of the time, which continues in different manifestations yet today. In this article, I make use of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of the flesh to discuss how Müntzing’s work brings embodied understandings to the remnants of this history. I also introduce the reflections of Walter Benjamin on relating to history through re-enlivening the past in the present. As Müntzing invigorates the somatic aspects of this history through her works, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology adds flesh to Benjamin’s discussion about the importance of re-enlivening history – and retaining those remnants of the past that contain the seeds of resistance against oppression.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In particular, I look at her engagement with the history of textile work in Sweden and the UK during the period between the two world wars. The research for this article was conducted as part of a larger research project, Interwar Lens Cultures, which is a collaboration between HDK -Valand Academy and the Institute for Cultural Sciences at Gothenburg University, and the Hasselblad Foundation, also in Gothenburg, Sweden. The aim of the wider project is to revisit and rethink the practices and meanings of lens-based visual cultures in the interwar years through a focus on hitherto under-researched connections between photography and film in Sweden and beyond. In my part of this research project, I approach this period through contemporary works that relate in different ways to this history, as well as through my own engagement with material from this time. For further information about the project, see https://www.gu.se/forskning/interwar-lens-media-cultures-1919-1939.

2 A few names could be mentioned including Inci Eviner and Gülsün Karamustafa (who work on archives that relate to Ottoman and Turkish history), Walid Ra’ad and the artist duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (that both relate to the destruction of Beirut during the civil war), and Lina Selander (who works on archives relating to a collective European history). In my recent book, I look at the work of all these artists from an affective theoretical perspective. Erika Larsson, Photographic Engagements, Belonging and Affective Encounters in Contemporary Photography, Gothenburg, Makadam, 2018.

3 Amelia Jones, “Unpredictable Temporalities: The Body and Performance in (Art) History”, Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, ed. by Rune Gade and Gunhild Borggreen, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2013.

4 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 19.

5 Taylor, 2003, p. 26.

6 The city of Borås and its surroundings have been a centre of the textile industry for centuries. Although the textile factories have since closed, Borås is still known as the textile capital of Sweden. On the site of the old weaving factories there is now a Textile Fashion Centre, which contains the Textile Museum. The University of Borås also contains the Swedish School of Textiles.

7 This and other descriptions come from conversations with the artist in June 2020.

8 Questions relating to the silences, empty spaces and creative potential of archives have also been explored within queer art through the work of Ann Cvetkovich, Mathias Danbolt and others. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Duke University Press, 2003 and Mathias Danbolt, Touching History: Touching History: Art, Performance, and Politics in Queer Times, University of Bergen, 2013.

9 Sonntag stayed at Algots until 1942 and, in addition to his work at the textile factory, he also became the local leader of the Nazi movement in the area. See Mats Segerblom, Algots: en teko-koncerns uppgång och fall, Stockholm: Liber Förlag, 1983.

10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lefort, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, Evanston Ill, Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 147.

11 Furthermore, what this perspective allows him to do is recognise the extent to which any conceptual division (between the objects and the subject, between the real and the imagined, and between the image and space) is a construction after the fact. This is not to say that they are false; as Merleau-Ponty makes clear, the very idea of falsifying a fact is only made possible after having left the carnal experience and lost “faith in the perceptual”. Rather, the significance lies in the recognition that these divisions are not traits of situated space itself, but are conceptual partitions, which at times have been useful for a certain type of dialogue about relations in the world, but which need to be discarded as new and more fruitful understandings emerge.

12 It is important to recognize how Müntzing works within a tradition of feminist and textile art, which includes numerous examples of how women’s work have been thematized, but without being foremost interested in the carnal aspects of archival knowledge. To mention some names included in this traditions, one could bring out scholars like Maria Elena Busczek, Jane Collins, Kirsty Robertson, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Roszika Parker, and Jessica Hemmings, and by artists like Sascha Reichstein, Zoe Sheehan Saldana, Lisa Oppenheim, Lisa Vinebaum, Janis Jeffries, Anne Wilson, Suzanne Bocanegra and the book The Object of Labor: Art Cloth, and Cultural Production, ed. by Joan Livingstone, The MIT Press, 2007. In a Swedish context, one could mention the work of the artist Maria Adlercreutz and her tapestry “Hanna Keller, textilarbeterska på Tuppens fabriker i Norrköping 1920”, 1994 and the exhibition “Verkligheten sätter spår (Reality makes traces)”, 1975–1976 at Röhsska Museet, Gothenburg, where looms and sewing tables were installed in the exhibition room.

13 While Foucault does locate the body in the archive, for instance, in Discipline and Punish, he does not engage directly with somatic experience. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

14 Jones, 2013, p. 63.

15 Jones, 2013, p. 70.

16 The reference to durationality comes from Henri Bergson’s concept of duration, which he first introduced in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1889, Dover Publications, 2001.

17 The unfinished Arcades Project was reconstructed and analysed by Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, The MIT Press, 1991.

18 For Benjamin, the dialectical image is the primal phenomenon of history. Ibid and Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (also referred to as On the Concept of History), https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html, accessed 1 November 2019. The reference to Proust in found in Buck-Morss, 1991.

19 As is that of Miriam Hansen who, in her recent scholarship on Walter Benjamin, is more interested in his notion of the aura or his critique of modernity. Cinema and Experience, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, University of California Press, 2011; and “Benjamin’s Aura”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34, No. 2, Winter 2008, pp. 336–375.

20 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

21 Significantly, Benjamin conceived of the remnants of history through a visual logic, and thus perceived of them as images whether they were verbally or pictorially represented.

22 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

23 Erik Berggren, Exhibition text for Code, The Museum of Work, Norrköping, 2018 (my translation).

24 Employment, Wages and Productivity, Trends in the Asian Garment Sector. Data and Policy Insights for the Future of Work. Report by International Labor Organization, 2022. The report focuses on countries with garment exporting industries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Viet Nam.

25 I have found the notion of political phenomenology also recently being used in Political Phenomenology, Essays in Memory of Petee Jung, edited by Hwa Yol Jung, Lester Embree, part of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology, Springer Cham, volume 84, 2016 and Political Phenomenology, Experience, Ontology, Episteme, ed. by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann, New York, Routledge, 2019. These publications focus more on how phenomenology can help reformulate central concepts in political theory.

26 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 1991.

27 Rader efter rader i samlingarna, vita vantar, skyddslådor, silkespapper, vem bestämmer, vad finns här (my translation).

28 Vilka är kvinnorna som gjort detta som fått ett helt museum och en samling över sitt arbete men själva inte finns här (my translation).

29 Möter er som var där då och nu i museet och ni finns inte där, inte det ni kan det ni minns det ni gjorde (my translation).

30 Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968, p. 36.

31 Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968, p. 114.

32 Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968, p. 119.

33 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 146.

34 Rebecca Schneider, “Performance Remains”, Performance Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2001, p. 104.

35 Code is also the title of an exhibition at the Museum of Work, Norrköping, in which these works were included.

36 In other pieces, Müntzing examines alternative forms of communication or “secret languages” in relation to socialist and politically radical movements. Before her work on the textile industry, in a project called Mapping Panther Politics (2014), she made connections between the activism of young people in the area of Biskopsgården in Gothenburg and the Black Panthers in the USA. She also made connections between the language of “mee-mawing” and Fankalo, a language that had been especially developed for the mines of South Africa and which is understood only by the initiated. In all cases, there is an engagement with different kinds of languages of opposition.

37 Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History, Thesis XVI.

38 Benjamin borrowed the notion of the monad from Gottfried Leibniz who developed his reflections on the concept in The Monadology. In Liebniz’ understanding, monads are fundamental existing entities, understood through their singularity and indivisibility. For Benjamin, the significance of the notion lies in the possibility of encountering the entirety of a body, place or historical event through an engagement with a monad. See Nicholas Rescher N., G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991.

39 I have found the notion of political phenomenology also recently being used in Political Phenomenology, Essays in Memory of Petee Jung, ed. by Hwa Yol Jung, Lester Embree, part of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology, Springer Cham, volume 84, 2016; and Political Phenomenology, Experience, Ontology, Episteme, ed. by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann, New York: Routledge, 2019. These publications focus more on how phenomenology can help reformulate central concepts in political theory.

40 Similarly, contemporary theorists like Jill Bennett and Ann Chetkovich bring our attention to the inseparability of affective (both as embodied and emotional) experience with particular political situations. Chetkovich, An Archive of Feelings; and Jill Bennett, “Migratory Aesthetics: Art and Politics beyond Identity”, in Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture Conflict, Resistance, and Agency, ed. by M. Bal and M. Á. Hernández-Navarro, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2011, pp. 109–126.