TEXERE Conference 2002 Lisbon

Conference:
Part 1
Part 2
(This is Part 3)
Part 4
Part 5
Finale

TEXERE Conference Lisbon 2002

Part 3 of the Conference Report

Day 1 - Performances - Day 2 - Day 3 - Comenius - Finale

DAY 2
Thursday 07/ 03/ 2002
In the forenoon the General Meeting of TEXERE took part (the members have got the minutes).
For the non-members a visit to the Textile collections of the 'Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian' was provided.

Afternoon Programme
Location: Auditorium of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon

PANEL: TEXTILE ART AND DESIGN - Lectures
Co-ordinator: Luísa Mota – Graduate in Educational Psychology

Pamela Hardesty – Artist and lecturer at the Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, Ireland

“A Language of Faith: from Paper to Glass”

First she explained her backgrounds and secondly she showed slides of her work since she went to Ireland and commented on them. The work is monumental and sober, yet rich in detail and expression, due to the way she used her materials (paper, wire and glass).
In 1986 she moved from the USA to Ireland in the hope of finding a simpler way of life, hopefully in a society more attuned to spiritual exploration, more appreciative of the poetic and the immaterial.
She said: “I have settled in Ireland to teach and work, developing my artistic vocabulary through a wide range of materials and processes, all united by a textiles sensibility and an effort to articulate through form my evolving Christian faith”.
Her first works in Ireland were realised through the medium of paper. She developed methods to apply pigments and various abrasive and heat treatments to imitate organic surfaces. … Since 1991 her work changed direction, away from nature. She explored new materials, which worked very directly with light through transparency and reflection. Glass became her main focus. … She cut the glass into small squares or triangles and mounted these on patterns of nails to make relief mosaics, which could float over painted images underneath. She felt that glass was more appropriate now to her clearer realisation of faith. She developed ways to use wire to wrap and link glass units into fabric-like and flexible structures and three-dimensional vessels. The actual process of constructing these complex works is meditative and prayerful. …
She concluded her presentation by telling: “In the year 2001 I became a Catholic, and my work has increasingly sought to serve my faith as a contemporary response. It is beginning to find a role in places of worship”.

Helena Cardoso – Textile and fashion designer inspired by Portuguese textile traditions

“Crafts and Knowledge”

She showed us her fashion collections (on video) and explained her sources of inspiration. As a fashion designer she already was orientated from the start on folk costumes and folk culture.
[…] “Eighteen years ago, I was asked to participate in a project that had as a main goal the development of the economic and cultural life of some groups of women in the Portuguese countryside. Supported by the EC, small unites of women manufacturers were created and have lasted in four small mountain villages in the northern part of the country until today. In these isolated villages, with their uses, traditions and a specific knowledge, women have maintained their old culture and one can not help feeling astonished with the wonders they kept in their trunks. The linen involved in rosemary, the embroidery with fainted colours from three generations, poetically surprise us …. Reinventing these kind of knowledge and enhancing new parameters … was a way of giving them visibility without forgetting the culture and the tradition that supports them. Together with these women, we discovered the possible bridges between the rural world and the city world. By presenting this work, which has been so gratifying for me, I want to help to draw the attention to the richness of our popular art, so well kept in some regions of our country” […]

Mireille Houtzager – Lecturer to the Academy of Visual Arts and Art Education; Fontys Faculty of the Arts, Tilburg, The Netherlands

“The place, Role and Influence of Textile Art & Design in Dutch Art Education: Past, Present, and Future”

Mireille explained she did some archaeology into her own past, her own work as head of the former department of Textile Art and Design at the Tilburg Art Academy. What did we do, why did we do what we have done and what does it mean?
She gave a brief overview of the past history of Art Education in the Netherlands up from about 1970 until today, focused on two major reforms; reforms in which Textile Art and Design played an important role. In the Seventies Textiles became an obligatory, new subject, part of the General Art Education. The first reform had revolutionary consequences for Art Academies, Art Institutes and Teacher Training Colleges: Textile Art & Design was at least a revolutionary newcomer! A whole generation of former educated people in textile related subjects (embroidery, fashion, textile design, weaving, tapestry) had to be totally reformed and re-educated; new departments and faculties had to be raised, new programmes developed. Textiles did well out of it: during the Eighties Textile was a booming subject in Art Schools and in Art Education.
During the second half of the Nineties yet another reform took place. This reform was concentrated on Secondary Education and foremost on the second phase. […]
This second reform had everything to do with what happened in society and moreover with what happened in the arts during the past twenty to thirty years: Society and art have changed. Art is no longer for art-disciplined sake only. Art involves all human senses and its materialisation is a question of concepts and ideas: the contemporary artist has to be a generalist!
Years before all this actually took place, we (a group of people at my Institute) were already convinced that art education must be involved in the arts, live!
In between 1995 and 1998 we rebuild our curriculum, we pulled down the original structure of discipline based departments and we installed a broad, transparent programme, obligatory to all students. […]
Textile art & design is no longer an isolated department at my academy anymore, but one out of four offered art specialisation's, called 'XXL body related art & design'.
Mireille concluded: “textile art played an interesting and major role in both reforms. In being both two- and three-dimensional, both art and design, both body related and theatrical in performances and installations, textile art was one of the outstanding subjects proving the flexibility of contemporary art and art education”.[…]
To illustrate these (historical) textile achievements, she showed a chronological series of slides (works of her students), going back to the year 1978 up to the year 2001, split up in two major subjects: 'the Language of the Materials', and 'the Language of the Body'. Finally she showed some video's in order to illustrate what is happening know within this new (textile) specialisation, called: 'XXL body related art & design'.

Pedro Brandão – Architect. Chair of the Portuguese Centre of Design

“Promoting Design Through an Integrated Project”

This lecture was done by means of a Power-point presentation. So without seeing the actual presentation there is no use of explaining its content. Pedro Brandão explained the main strategies of this Centre by pointing out the importance of bundling strength in order to promote Portuguese Design and Fashion, both national and international (for example at Trade Fairs). Moreover the centre is publishing an annual Design Yearbook; they organise competitions for fashion, textile and interior designers.

Vera Sá da Costa - Phd in Chemical Engineering (MIT), Chair of the Portuguese Tapestry Manufacture

"Tapestry – The Fascination of Painting with Wool"

This lecture consisted of a Power-point presentation. At first the tapestry techniques were explained, next there was a brief overview on the history of tapestry (French and Flemish tapestries). Finally she explained to us the new tapestry techniques, developed in this manufacture especially in order to increase the density to 5 stitches per centimetre.

Gisella Santi – Master in Tapestry; she was born in Italy, lives and works in Portugal

About contemporary Tapestry”

Because of the fact that Gisella Santi is ill, one of her students is reading her lecture. The lecture is short, the slideshow is forming the most important part of it.
Gisella Santi came to Portugal in 1975 and she now has had a long and very fruitful career of 45 years in tapestry. She runs her own studio and her own school in which students can learn everything there is to be learned about tapestry. The studio/ school works on two major aims: the restoration of old tapestries, and the making of new ones.

Sara Barriga – Graduated in plastic arts/ Sculpture by FBA-UL, Portugal

“The poetics of Loss: a multimedia Installation/ Site-specific project in Brussels” (printing)

Her presentation introduced us to a project called 'Project Stévin – Poetics of loss' which took place in Brussels in 1998.
[…] “It is a social artistic work that was a sister project to 'Logements Célestes – Woongerief', produced by BRALL and sponsored by the Flemish Government, the objective of which its was to recuperate the architectural and sociological aspects of a block of 37 buildings. The Stévin project has two aspects to it. Firstly it aimed at transporting the viewer into an introspective journey related to domestic intimacies, and secondly to approach the cruel reality of expropriation and eradication of historical areas (facts that occurred in Brussels during the Seventies and Eighties). A theme that was in public debate at the time the project was in effect” […]
The work is site-specific, installed in a home that was abandoned in 1971 due to expiration of its residents. Number 93 rue Stévin is a building that is now partially in ruins, although it still holds some of the remnants of a past existence of the daily livelihoods of its residents. It were these remnants that served as a base for her work.
There were many interventions in this projected area that seemed to stimulate the four senses – sight, smell, touch and hearing – taking the observant visitant in a journey into several rooms. The audio-visual metaphors used in the installation were bruitage, photography, and silk print, amongst others. The intentions of this stimulation was to bring to the memory of the visitor the everyday sounds, textures, images and smells which belonged to the quotidian domestic life of the inhabitants of this quarter. […]
The slides of this project illustrated in a wonderful way this amazing installation. You experienced yourself as a voyeur in a haunted house

Evening Programme

In the evening we had our Portuguese Dinner in the Cervejaria Trindade (Trindade Beer house) with splendid tiles by 'Ferreira das Tabuletas' - see some pictures of this fascinating location

Day 3 >>
Day 1 - Performances - Day 2 - Day 3: Comenius - Finale

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July, 2002
Design: Hannelore Kapuste