Stefanie Knobel’s work primarily deals with questions of labour, technology and tactile interactions. One of her works that particularly interested me was called Oh my silly, silly, silly mind! which consists of 4 works that all deal with the artist’s critique of the item of cotton, studied through a postcolonial lens. One of the 4 works, titled Interfacing the non- weaves text and textile in a dialogue around technology. Stefanie sourced a piece of white woven cotton from India.


These are the 3 phrases Stefanie has stenciled on the windows in white silicone. The cotton fabric is hung inside the space while flat-screen monitors play videos on loop. Each video shows the hand of the artist caressing the cotton. The movements of the hand are minimalist, and no extra effort is made in the direction of theatrical excess. A precarious gesture that induces vicarious pleasure in the action of caressing, the installation raises ecological questions around natural resources, their colonial histories and current entanglements in cross-border production politics that began with the Volkart Brothers, a trading company from Winterthur in the 19th century/early 20th century which subsequently had a major influence over the distribution of wealth through cotton worldwide. The words ‘hereish’ and ‘nowish’ also, in their rejection of certainty of emphasis, imply a transit in thought and by extension, a geo-political slippage.

Stefanie’s concern with cotton came from a long-standing observation of how substances that come in contact with the skin have changed the skin- be it the effect of fertilizers on farmers’ bodies or the ubiquity of cotton fabrics in India. She sources the cotton for her performances from one particular place as she is hesitant to mix different kinds of cotton (and therefore, different histories of production). By combining movement with research on the material of cotton, I believe Stefanie creates a new methodology of data transmission. Stefanie’s grandfather worked in a textile factory not far from Winterthur- in the weaving industry in the Zürcher Oberland. Drawing on this association, Stefanie chooses the material of cotton and studies its present modes of production that still rely on hierarchies of power (in that its production is outsourced by European nations for cheap labour).

In Stefanie’s work, the ‘archive’ rests in the cohabitation of the physical and the digital on one plane. On another plane, the material of cotton itself carries the weight of a colonial history that has its traces in Winterthur through the Volkart Brothers. Cotton, as a document of this history, constitutes the performance while the skin, as a medium, becomes a pulsating conveyor of the same.