Skins

Textiles produce spaces in ways that are closesly linked to the body. In the movie „Tengo Miedo Torero“, the protagonist La Loca uses textiles as a spacemaking tool in many different ways that include performances, (house)work, inhabitation, playing, hiding and showing. With the help of fabrics she transforms the living room to a performance space, the street to a laundry, an open field to a living room.

As a link between body and architecture, the use of textiles can support an architecture that is able to spontaneously adapt to a multitude of changing bodies. Spatially, textiles can act as additional layers of skins, protective as well as projective, more nuanced and negotiable than walls. In the housing units, walls that delineate common and private, are dissolved into multiple, mostly textile layers, enabling different ways of inhabiting and living together. They are questioning the spatial dichotomy of common and private and direct towards more temporal, fluid and potentially unexpected spaces for hosting and receiving care, for intimacy and publicness.

Textiles are closely related to precarious and/or unpaid work, whether in their production or in their use. In the collages, textiles related to care work are applied onto a base of blue linen. Linen is made from flax, a plant that was once widely covering the fields around Bern, serving as the main ressource for the textile industry before the introduction of cotton. Before spinning was centralized in mills, spinning flax to threads was work done by women on farms in the evenings, after the working day was over, producing extra income while not being counted as work. Today, flax is being rediscovered as a local ressource for textiles with many advantages, from it‘s antibacterial and hypoallergetic capacities to it‘s durability, strength and breatheability.

Like the laundry hung on the street in the movie „Tengo Miedo Torero“, the textiles of care in the collage are visibilizing common daily interactions with textile, that are oftentimes related to housework. Managing housework can become difficult if mobility is decreasing. However, unlike care and medicinal services, support in house work tasks is not covered by the insurance and can become a large financial burden. The shared internal street with the kitchens, cleaning and bathing spaces is enabling mutual support and collective management, or in case of the need of external support, the lowering of individual costs. The facilities of the laundry, kitchen, toilets and water supplies on the groundfloor which are shared (primarily) with the neighboring building, facilitate the inhabitation of the street as a public neighborhood of care.