AN INTUITIVE PROCESS
Brussels, April 2024
My conversation with EDITH DEKYNDT began just over a year ago when I first visited her studio in Brussels. I was particularly struck by her way of combining emerging and evolving technologies, ancestral knowledge and contemporary challenges. The dialogue continued over time, taking the form of two exhibitions at the CAB Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and the Walter Leblanc Foundation in Brussels.
Jacket Courrèges, shirt and jeans Edith’s own
I'd like to start with a very simple question: where does your interest in textiles come from? Looking at your various projects and our recent collaborations, I can see that it’s a medium that you often use and that carries a lot of meaning for you.
It's a practice that goes back a long way: I've never made a distinction between sewing and drawing. Textiles can be a support, but they're much more than that. It's a language, it’s about materials that can be combined with air, wind, water, sea and fine sand. It's one of the fundamental elements of human civilization: covering oneself, sheltering and eating. The manipulation of stone and metal enabled the creation of tools, weapons and containers. This led to hunting, the cutting of flesh, skins and furs. Millennia later, animal hair was felted, and millennia after that, it was spun, knitted and woven. In every known civilization, the gestures of binding, weaving and embroidery have been associated with cults, stories and mythologies. And just like skins and bones, plants have enabled us to enhance our bodies with song and dance. The movements that link us to our ancestors are also those of sewing, wrapping, encircling, protecting, tying and preserving.
It's a lineage of materials whose behaviour interests me. We say of a fabric that it 'falls' well, of a garment that it 'falls' well; it's rarer to say that of sculpture, painting or architecture. Textiles fall in fountains, waterfalls, waves. I seek out strategies that bring about this form of collapse.
Jacket Courrèges, shirt, jeans and sneakers Edith’s own
Speaking specifically of this family of materials and their behaviour, could you tell us about your recent project in which textiles and ceramics are closely linked? I mean the ceramics developed in collaboration with Unfold Studio in Antwerp, where the pieces are deliberately affected by ‘glitches’ during printing on clay, creating folds reminiscent of textiles.
3D printing works in much the same way as knitting, macramé or crochet: a thread of fluid material drawn from a kind of syringe travels a three-dimensional path in space according to a given digital design. If the thread is a clay thread, the thread structure can be fired, to create a ceramic.
With Unfold, we asked ourselves how it might be possible to create ceramic folds without copying a fabric. Claire [Warnier] and Dries [Verbruggen] came up with the idea of creating a glitch during the printing process, an idea that turned out to be right because each glitch resulted in a unique fold that was impossible to reproduce.
A fold is therefore a glitch, a bug, an error, a term first used during the preparation of Apollo 11:
“I just threw a 'glitch' into the light when I was turning my warning lights off and on,” said Gordon Cooper during the flight of Mercury-Atlas 9 when a gravity signal showed on his switchboard during an orbital free fall. Cooper was renowned for his phlegm, but one butterfly of the night must have beat its wings in his throat when he looked at a dial which showed the force of gravity was present at a time when he knew he must be without weight. (Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer, 1970)
This notion of error, of straying, whether in human gesture or machine behaviour, is often part of the process of my projects. In Insomniac Dream (2004), for example, a digital camera tries to focus on an unoccupied wall in the space. The fact that it is aimed at a dark surface prevents the autofocus mechanism from focusing. The resulting film is projected into the same space, creating a mirror effect that disturbs perception. Shifting alternately from blurred to sharp, the optical phenomenon contaminates reality and produces a feeling of vertigo.
Recently, videos such as Opuntia ficus-indica (2023) and Netzach (2024) have been produced using an ordinary mobile phone application. These are digital views of objects that the application cannot properly capture due to their scale. The results are random interpretations whose texture does not give a precise reading of the nature of the objects scanned. They are at once mineral, vegetable and animal, they could be timeless figures of worship floating in space.
Full look Courrèges
I see three fundamental elements in the way you define your work, and I'd like to hear more about them: context, process and temporality. First, there is the importance of the context in which works are conceived, produced and shown. Then there’s the working process, which involves research and experimentation. And finally, once installed, how works can be transformed over time by other factors, such as light, temperature…
Discovering a context is like walking alone in a forest, on a beach, or in an unfamiliar city. It's like being swallowed up by a landscape, unfolding yourself into it and then folding back into yourself. It's a bit animalistic: all the senses are invited to curl up slowly in the interstices, the angles, the voids, the power, the softness. It summons the physical and the mental: an absorbed state in which we plunge towards intuition, disorder, the sensual, the confused.
The process comes from previous explorations and wanderings in combining materials, objects and media. It's a regular, slow and continuous activity of training oneself to accept encounters, behaviour and chance.
I then place elements that seem to me to accord with the resonance, light, temperature, humidity, smell and sound of the space. These are assemblages that, depending on their nature, will be modified by their position in a given place. They will change state: from solid to liquid, from liquid to gas. They will fade, rust, break down and, sometimes, disappear. I can only partially control their behaviour; matter has a way of thinking and a language that I follow according to what I know about it.
I try to introduce multiple readings into my pieces and installations, using fairly basic means and in such a way that everyone can see something singular in them. I try to unveil, bring to light, make visible, but also make [them] disappear. They can also reveal anthropological, historical, geographical, physical, geological, chemical or meteorological evidence. Nevertheless, they are generally the result of an intuitive process that blends the conscious and the unconscious, the material and the immaterial, the pure and the impure, the ignoble and the sublime.
Jacket Courrèges, shirt Edith’s own
Edith Dekyndt and María Inés Rodríguez collaborated on the creation of the exhibition Specific Subjects at the CAB Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, which will be on view until October 27, 2024. Edith Dekyndt will present a solo show at Konrad Fischer Galerie in September 2024. Her work will notably be shown at the Soft Power exhibition at Das Minsk Kunsthaus in Potsdam until August 8, Leaps of Faith, Z33, Hasselt until August 6, Regenerative Futures, Thalie Foundation, Brussels, until September 8, Black Flags exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe until October 6, Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica presented at the Art Institute of Chicago from December 22, 2024 - March 30, 2025.
Sweater Courrèges
Jacket Courrèges, shirt Edith’s own
Interview by María Inés Rodríguez
Photography by Hanna Pallot
Fashion by Pierre Daras