TEXTILE SPACES: Inhabiting the Interface

Textile Spaces: Inhabiting the Interface is the latest publication by Sara Coleman. A book edited by Dr. Ana Soler, and published in collaboration with the research group dx5 digital & graphic art_research and the publishing DARDO, in which a reflection on textile spaces and specifically on textile installation in contemporary art is proposed.

The publication investigates the relationship between body and space through textile modes. An approach based on the technological textile model proposed by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, through which the author hypothesizes that the textile is a reflection of a structure of thought that occurs through a material relationship between body and space, where the textile is situated as an interface.

The book analyzes more than 200 works by pioneering and contemporary artists who have been working with textiles from their processuality and materiality, in order to highlight how the textile functions as a mode of linking thought and spatial interface.

The first part of the book immerses us in textile spatial processuality in order to establish a reflection and a re-conceptualization of weaving from a contemporary perspective; in the first moment, laying the foundations of weaving as a complex interrelational system and in a second moment linking it with different disciplinary fields, such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology or writing, which is why this essay starts from a transdisciplinary approach.

Then, in order to analyze the interrelationships between body and space through textile modes, a vectorial system is established: body-space vector, skin-fabric vector and fabric-garment-home vector, through which different works are studied, showing the interrelationships between them. This, in turn, will lead the author to conceptualize installation textiles as that fourth symbolic skin where all the aforementioned vectors are interwoven.

Finally, an exploration of several contemporary installations that work on the generation of haptic spaces through 'textile modes' is carried out. An exploration that, without the intention of categorizing or compartmentalizing the analyzed works, is organized according to three models: the reticular model, the rhizomatic model and the network model, establishing non-linear links between them and that, finally, will place us before the question: “at present, are we witnessing a new textile mode that goes beyond the network model?”

Thus, through this publication, we enter into a journey that will take us from the tectonic to the topological, from the reticular to the rhizomatic, in a displacement that marks the passage from the static to the dynamic, from the rigid and structured to the soft, flexible and modulable. In short, from the sedentary striated space to the nomadic smooth space (in Deleuzean-Guattarian terms), until reaching the interweaving that takes place between them.

This publication is an adaptation of the doctoral thesis presented in 2023 by Dr. Sara Martínez Pérez-Coleman and directed by Dr. Ana Soler. In 2024 the book is published with the support of the dx5 group and DARDO. Funding Agency: Xunta de Galicia. Department of Culture, Education and University.