To Be and To Become: essay + talk (2022)
To Be and To Become: Identity in art, craft and design
— in and out of the Seven Districts
MADE POSSIBLE BY BOY KONSTHALL, THE TEXTILE MUSEUM OF SWEDEN, SENSUS BORÅS, HEMSLÖJDSKONSULENTERNA VGR
TEXTILE MUSEUM OF SWEDEN
4 MAY 2022
I am currently exhibiting the project Att Vara och Att Vilja Bli: To Be and To Become at Boy Konsthall in Bollebygd. The work has circled the cultural heritage of the Hedared basket. My great-grandfather, Lennart Pettersson, was an artisan known as ‘the last basket maker from Risa’. Risa is a small community in the village of Hedared.
My ambition has been to explore the basket as a community bearing object — understand its cultural historical relevance, social influence, and contemporary significance. The project has led me to a discover the universal language that is craft; a language that, for me, infiltrates sustainability, contemporary design, cultural heritage, identity and personal belonging. Tonight, I am sitting here with Sara Degerfält and Linnea MF Larsson, who will shortly introduce themselves. Our aim is to explore identity in relation to art, design and craft processes.
As the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father, I naturally have an extensive view of the world, anchored in the belief that inclusivity and representation are important, especially when it comes to the re-telling of history. My own background, with one foot in two different cultures, is something I have always perceived as a great asset — to inherently understand the duality of being part of more than one cultural context. At the same time, it has often led to felt frictions, experiencing a kind of cultural in-betweenness — growing up as queer, as a Swede having the name Fadhel, having Swedish as my first language, yet unable to speak Arabic.
To find that place of belonging in my own identity, I have always searched for outlets that can help to decipher the common denominators that exist within my different cultures. To use this sense of ‘in-betweenship’ as a tool to communicate beyond barriers of language or culture. This is a process that has led me to the vast field of textiles, and to weaving in particular, as a way to be able to speak through making. To let my making be an extension of myself.
In the anthology series Fässingen (1996), Bengt K.Å Johansson, former governor of the western county Älvsborg, where Borås is located, writes:
‘In Veden there was never any rich soil, nothing has been given. The people had to work for their bread and stay inventive to make ends meet. Perhaps it’s this that has developed the peoples’ mentality: suspicious of arrogance but all the more industrious and diligent with a strong history of perseverance.’
In 1901, my great-grandfather Lennart was born into an impoverished family of basket makers in Hedared. The Petterson family was part of the rich cottage industry that existed in Sjuhärad during the first half of the 20th century. It was through a necessity for survival that Lennart was introduced to his craft. Handicraft was used as a tool to get by, to be able to put food on the table. The boundary between work and life itself did not exist. The necessity was ever present. Making baskets was not a choice, it was a duty. Over time, this approach to making became part of Lennart’s person, and of his artisanal identity. His work as a basket maker was an extension of his family’s necessity. Making was something serious, important, it was something with rules, conditions and responsibilities. His craftsmanship was shaped by these values — by necessity and duty.
As a recent graduate in textile design, I have a close connection to traditional crafts through my specialisation in hand weaving. Since I studied on a design course, weaving was put into an industrial context, where students were trained in how to devise the production of woven textiles from an industrial perspective.
Tonight, we are sitting here at the Textile Museum of Sweden, a historically significant place that carries on the industrial evolution that Sjuhärad has undergone during the last century. The permanent exhibition Textile Kraft shows the journey from production processes being rooted in the local to now being global. How industrialism developed the drive to create — from necessity to an industrial freedom of choice.
Born in Borås in the early nineteen nineties, I am a digital native, part of a generation with the digital sphere of information, and the possibility of consumption, constantly available. As a designer, I feel a strong need to reflect, discuss and challenge the comforts that my generation has access to — understand how these factors influence cultural diversity, environmental sustainability and political inclusion. For me, these are fundamental factors that impact the process of making as much as it influences the becoming of one’s own person.
During the project To Be and To Become, these thoughts were translated into an exploration of my own identity via the Hedared basket. I wanted to understand my own social context as a queer person belonging to multiple cultures, my role as a designer and the place of my own craft as a hand weaver. It was through the Hedared basket that this exploration became possible — looking back to be able to look forward.
But nothing exists in a vacuum. My own thoughts and lived experience connected to my own work find themselves in parallel to the realities of others, and their methods of responding to similar questions. Identity can belong to people but also to things and objects.
What values and concepts are present in a making process? How are our identities reflected in what we create?
The theme is vast, and tonight I hope that we together can discuss, share thoughts and explore how lived experience and embodied knowledge informs one’s identity as a contemporary designer, craftsman or artist.
LINK TO FULL TALK HERE (IN SWEDISH)
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