Program

Archive, Craft, and the Imagined Divide

Symposium at House Belsito, Italy

Jules van den Langenberg

We often hear that our societies are more divided than ever. Elites versus “ordinary people.” Cities versus countryside. Tradition versus progress. Craft versus concept. Archive versus innovation. The language of opposition dominates contemporary discourse.

But are these divisions as real and factual as we assume? Or are many of them imagined, amplified by emotion rather than grounded in material reality?

In the Netherlands, public debate has increasingly been framed through the lens of polarization. Emotions have become arguments. Feelings are presented as facts. We are told: you only truly know something when you feel it. Experience replaces analysis. Emotion replaces evidence.

This shift is not only visible in politics. It permeates cultural institutions, academies, museums, and the field of art and design. What was once private has become public. What was once internal has become performative. The entire social fabric has become emotionalized.

There is something positive in this development. For centuries, Western thought privileged rationality over feeling. From cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, to today’s belief that knowledge is grounded in lived experience. Emancipatory movements have shown us that emotions such as anger and pride can be powerful forces for equality and recognition.

But there is also a complication.

When emotion becomes the dominant lens through which we perceive the world, differences can feel larger than they actually are. Small distinctions become deep divides. Perceived gaps overshadow factual realities. We begin to live not among real cleavages, but among imagined ones; what we might call “phantom divides.”

And perhaps this is where archive, craft, and leftover wool enter the conversation.

Wool is a material of continuity. It carries memory, of sheep, of land, of labor, of domestic interiors, of industrial systems. It is both humble and noble. It belongs to peasant traditions and haute couture alike. It is rural and metropolitan. It is archive and possibility at once.

When working with leftover wool (surplus, remnants, fragments) we encounter material that has already had a life. It bears traces of intention, production, and abandonment. In this sense, leftover wool becomes a metaphor for society itself: layered, uneven, historically charged.

Yet unlike political discourse, material does not shout. It resists simplification. It asks to be handled, reworked, reimagined.

In many contemporary debates, we see a dynamic between “established” and “newcomer.” Those who feel secure fear losing their position when others rise. The fear of falling on the social ladder often drives resistance to equality. And yet, who can openly argue against equality?

This tension between established forms and new claims is mirrored in craft traditions. The archive may appear fixed, canonical, complete. But every archive is selective. Every tradition has always been in motion. Craft itself was once innovation.

When we approach wool through archival research and contemporary design, we do not simply preserve. We intervene. We reposition what seemed settled. We expose that continuity is not static repetition, but active transformation.

Imagined differences, between high art and craft, between rural material and conceptual discourse, between past and present, dissolve in the material encounter. Wool does not recognize these hierarchies. It moves between them.

In this sense, working with leftover wool can be understood as a quiet political act; not because it shouts slogans, but because it resists the logic of waste, hierarchy, and false dichotomy. It demonstrates that what is considered residual can become central. That what is discarded can gain new form. That what seems marginal may hold the structure together.

The danger of imagined divides is that they leave no room for a middle ground. Everything becomes binary: authentic or alien, traditional or progressive, craft or art. But material practice often occupies precisely that middle space. It refuses purity.

At a place like House Belsito, in the Italian context where textile traditions, regional histories, and contemporary experimentation intersect, we are reminded that material culture has always been hybrid. The archive is not a mausoleum. It is a reservoir.

If emotional polarization exaggerates difference, perhaps material practice can recalibrate perception. By slowing down. By touching. By making. By reworking what already exists.

Archive, craft, and contemporary art do not stand in opposition. They form a continuum, much like wool fibers spun together into yarn. Individually fragile, collectively strong.

If there is a role for artists and designers today, it may lie here:

Not in amplifying imagined divides, but in materializing nuance.

Not in choosing sides, but in weaving connections.

I wish us knowledge. But also tactility, patience, and attention.

Performative history

Arpino is a village in which two parts face each other, so that it is always the other side that has the better view, the sharpest sight, on life on the opposite side.

In Arpino we were invited to the magnificent Hotel Belsito for a symposium on history and wool. Today, in these regions, wool is largely wasted, relegated to the past. The symposium wanted to revive the dialogue about wools potential in the present.

I came as an extra. Annee, my girlfriend, and Jules, her friend and curator, took the lead. They have a lot to say about wool. I sneaked in behind. Until, I too was invited to talk. As an academic I am used to others expecting me to have thoughts on things I do not necessarily know much about. But I was pleased. The timing was perfect. The hour dark. A fire burned as we all sat in a circle. Everyone listened in silence to what I had to say. And I was encouraged to speak my mind freely. I choose to elaborate on history as a sociological concept—an account of the past made by humans for purposes in the present.

What I said that day I did not prepare, nor registered afterwards; it emerged and died in the moment. But this is what I could have said.

As we all know, every second is irrevocably lost to the past, and so the present is but a thin layer on top of an endless archive. The past encompasses (almost) everything, and yet it excels in absence. History, then, is what is left of the past, what is actively remembered. It is not an archive, but a curated selection of documents, facts, memories, smells, and so on, that are transformed into another form: a narrative, an image, an event. This implies an appropriation of the past for purposes in the present. History is not just selective, but performative.

This performativity is neither a negative nor a positive thing. Nor does it refer to fakeness. We perform ourselves everyday by getting dressed, by adopting a language we have not invented ourselves, using customs and conventions to secure a smooth engagement with the world, without necessarily betraying a sense of who we are. We express ourselves by mobilizing signs at our disposal. Similarly, history expresses the past through the signs given in the present. It weaves stories from contemporary concerns and uses the past as an endless source of inspiration.

For my thesis I studied contemporary practices of memorialization in Cambodia. As the atrocities of the past—the Khmer Rouge genocide—were remembered, they were also remembered in a certain way. In particular, one village in the north of the country, which had remained secluded long after the genocide as a Khmer-Rouge communist stronghold, was being integrated rhetorically into the national narrative, which opened up its telling of the past to include a more nuanced account of its leaders—their atrocious crimes, but also the community infrastructure they build. The shift in memorialization marked the political attempt at national integration, with a parallel attempt at internationalization, opening up parts of the country—as sites of memory—to foreigners like me—a westerner who ought to be seduced by the casino build next to Pol Pot’s grave.

And so history is not just here to bring the past back, but to artificially juxtapose two times, past and present, like two neighbors, two brothers, two Arpino street cats chasing each others tail.

The past has no eyes. With all its power, its vastness, it is cursed with blindness. Only the young, naïve and decadent present can offer such a vision. Those eyes are the people that care to tell about the past, to translate it into stories tangible as wool. Those eyes are the museum that freezes the past and mutilates it, but also makes it visible. The frozen past can be looked at, contemplated, like in a movie where all the characters freeze in space and only the hero can move around the statues. History then is an alternative movement into the past, performed in the present.

Yes, to be nostalgic is to be stuck in the past. But so is living in the present, with the past eating every lives second away. The only alternative then is to cultivate a rich conversation between past and present, each side seeing the other.

Jan Ferwerda

Woolgathering in Arpino

There are many places that we have never thought about, ones we don’t know exists and that we will never produce an idea of going to. Most of these places will stay unbeknownst to us. As we are gradually giving up our autonomy to the artificial, we venture less and less out without knowing where we are going. Even though the most interesting occurrences often are the ones that come about by chance, ones we could never have planned for. I had never thought about going to Arpino before friend and colleague Jules asked if I wanted to join a wool symposium at Belsito. With a lingering idea of going to Genova together with my boyfriend to explore Ligurian cuisine, Arpino materialised as the perfect adventure. I was asked to share my experiences of working with a specific type of craft, wool and a community of craftspeople in a small municipality in Norway. Given the chance of learning from Arpino, here is the story I offered in exchange. From a small place to another, Arpino slid out of steep warm southern mountain sides and merged with the northern forests of my youth.

I have come to share my work with the Selbu knitting tradition. A tradition of knitted garments, predominantly mittens, gloves and socks, but also sweaters, jackets and hats that originated in the municipality of Selbu, in the region of Trøndelag in Norway. With 4300 inhabitants, Selbu is about half the size of Arpino. The Selbu knitting tradition is recognised by its two threads, and ornamental geometric black and white patterns. The most famous among the ornaments being an eight petal rose - or star. In Selbu the star is known as «sjennros», in Norway it is known as the «Selbu rose» and for many tourists it is known as the «Norwegian star». The rosette or the eight-pointed star is a symbol that can be found in several ancient and indigenous cultures across the world and came to Selbu via old trade routes. Growing up we were taught to knit the mitten in school. It was very strict and to me it was everything that I wasn’t interested in: following somebody else’s pattern, using chosen colours and yarn and follow instructions, making a copy. There was nothing that excited me about it. I wanted to create my own things and the whole mitten business felt out of fashion and mind-numbing. I knit one mitten and left it at that. Years later, when the local store responsible for buying and selling mittens, announced that they had to close their doors, I happened to be back in Selbu for an artistic research project. While I was researching the notion of home and belonging, the news of the closing down caused a lot of engagement in Selbu. Shutting down this particular store didn’t only mean that sales and quality check of the mittens would stop, it meant the end of a hundred year old tradition. The practice itself was threatened.

My mother got involved. She used to run the family farm when I was young, later out of necessity, divorced with five children, she stopped the farm and finished her law degree and started her own office as a lawyer. She has always been engaged in local politics and as an enthusiast of crafts, together with the majority of people in Selbu, she could not imagine Selbu without a place taking care of the knitting tradition.

The «selburose» is represented on the municipal emblem, it is found in the logo of the plumber and the electrician, on school buildings and as tourist attraction and marketing for both the municipality and the local supermarket. The craft is a strong identity marker and source of pride in Selbu, whether you care about knitting or not.

The Selbu knitting tradition is kept alive not only by the practice of the craft but by its story. A captivating tale that has all the classical elements; courage, innovation, meaning, survival, community and romance. The story begins with Marit. Marit was about fifteen years old when she took one thread spun from the wool of the black sheep and one thread from the white sheep, and knit what has become known as the first pair of Selbu mittens. A mitten with a white background and a black star. It is said that she saw the star first on a bridal garment in church. One day she and her sisters came to church in winter all wearing mittens with stars. The sisters came from a tenant farm and were known for their skills as artisans. When they showed up with the mittens, people took notice and it didn’t take long before the two-thread knitting technique became popular. It spread from farm to farm all over Selbu. New patterns and combinations were invented, new stars and roses, with additional ornaments such as spiders, coffee beans and spruce twigs. Many became specific to both farms and people. People were skilled, they had their own sheep and spun their own yarn. The two-thread knitting became an integral part of everyday activities in Selbu and soon became synonymous with the wedding traditions as well. One of the rare occasions where the labour of women were given notice. There was weaving, sewing and embroidery - and now knitting. It is said that Marit handed in the first pair of mittens for sale in 1897. Around the same time, the mining of stones was surpassed by industrially made stones. Suddenly the craft of the two-thread knitting became a vital source of income for people in Selbu. People knit to feed their families, they knit to be able to buy clothes or get skis. At its peak as many as 3000 out of 4000 people in Selbu knit, both women, children and men knit and traded knitting for food. Many from the older generation still say: «if it wouldn’t have been for the knitting, they wouldn’t know what they would have done.» The craft was created, led and developed by women, and one of the most important aspects of the history of the Selbu knitting tradition is the fact that it rendered women’s work much more visible and enabled women to support themselves and to become independent.

The organisation that I now am part of running today together with my mother and three other women from Selbu, Selbu Husflidscentral, was initially founded in 1934 as an organ to control the quality of the knitting and transmit and oversee sales to other stores. In 1937 around 90 000 pairs of mittens were sold by Selbu Husflidscentral on behalf of the craftspeople in Selbu. An astonishing number in relation to the small population. As the sales grew the quality decreased; the yarn got thicker, the needles became larger and the patterns fewer; counting only a couple of variations when we took over. One of the tasks were therefor to make patterns and combinations of older mittens available again. Both to show the rich foundation of the craft and to inspire people to continue to knit and create patterns, and share knowledge across generations and carry the cultural heritage into the future. We collaborate with Selbu Spinneri, a local, young mill that focus on local and endangered breeds of sheep. The yarn they have made for us has made it possible to again knit the oldest mittens and garments that are found in Selbu.

In the end, its a story that offer an opportunity to connect to aspects of the practice that would otherwise be out of reach, Marit, the places that came and went, the people whose hands it passed through unlock connections between us, the past and the future.

Learning about the history of wool in the region of Arpino and the challenges they face related to the disseverance of crafts, skills and local materials strike many similar notes of the challenges we face in Selbu. Stories are not only reliant on their words, they are reliant on being heard and translated in time. Just as how it started, by curiosity, innovation and skills it developed into an archive of over 500 different patterns and combinations. Grateful to have been invited to share this story, I hope it can help locate and open up the stories that lay dormant in the hills of Arpino, stories of the past for the future.

Annee Grøtte Viken