practising contingency between music and textile


artistic research2024
A collaboration with Elisabetha Engel and Rebecca Cuschera.
How could chance encounters be used as generative forces? For us, three textile artists, it began with the find of Violoncello-Schule (a cello exercise book) in a free library and the subsequent discovery of our shared musical background. This contingent moment became the foundation of our research, leading us to explore how the cello exercises could be translated into textiles.

In line with translation scholar Lawrence Venuti’s interpretation of meaning as “a plural and contingent relation, not an unchanging unified essence,” we approached each translation as an open-ended exercise, shaped by experience, context, textile medium, material, and so on. As we continued our research, historical and cultural resonances — such as singing weavers in ancient Greece or rhythm-based pattern notation in Iranian Naqshe Khani — emerged as contingent relations with our own exercises, revealing that the intersection of music and textile may be less coincidental than it seems.

The outcomes of this research project were presented at CREA, Amsterdam in January 2024.






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I am a textile artist, researcher, and writer based in Amsterdam. Through my work runs a tangible thread spun from questions about materials, patterns, hierarchies, histories and traditions.

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© Frederiek Simons, 2024