These threads all come from old restorations,1 some of them probably several centuries old. They have been cut and removed from the tapestry by the conservator-restorer for various reasons: wear, for impeding the overall legibility of the image, inadequate repair, etc. The operation of cutting and subtraction reduces them to tiny fragments which mix with the dust on the floor and are vacuumed up and thrown away. If, as archaeologist Laurent Olivier wrote, 'history, the past, is nothing but a mountain of rubbish',2 the collecting here is done in small piles, heaps of very modest dimensions that build up very slowly. Needing more raw materials, I contacted three other Belgian tapestry restoration centres to ask them to give me their waste. They sometimes reacted with disconcertion, given the strangeness of the request. The workshops didn't understand why I wanted to collect this waste, which was 'unusable' and reduced to 'heaps of dust'.3 I had to be a bit insistent and give more explanations, even if it was difficult for me to be very precise about the use I would make of it. In the end, I was delighted to receive several postal parcels full of yarn waste. The conservation centres informed me that they only remove threads from old restorations - never original threads - and that the parcels also contained contemporary threads from their conservation work.4 On the other hand, it was not always easy to know which tapestry these scraps came from, either because they were mixed together or because this information was sometimes confidential.
I began meticulously organizing sort these little bits of threads by colour and material and gradually became aware of their importance, seeing in them an underlying sense of something larger. I found myself sorting these threads from a dull mass of colour, a shapeless grey-brown5 jumble, into a magnificent chromatic palette worthy of a painter. Sorting allowed me to see what I hadn't been able to see. Isolating the threads from each other6 made apparent the uniqueness of each thread: its colour, its materiality (shinye/matte, its thickness, texture...) but also its shape. Like all materials, yarn has its own memory. I dicovered that each thread, left in the same position for decades, even centuries, had acquired a particular shape that cannot be altered. Here, too, a bridge can be built with archaeology, because the material into which the archaeologist digs is not the past, but 'the memory of material things [...] the way in which matter records a memory: its own memory.'7
In the same way that an archaeologist patiently works to reassemble a vase from multiple shards, but with poetic rather than historical intent, I worked to reattach and link the small scraps of threads of the same material in order to find the original thread. The point of attachment that links two fragments is imperceptibly visible to the viewer who gets as close as possible to the material: a tangle of fibres, like a tiny ruffle, an eye-catching spun micro-star.8 This 'new' reconstituted thread has a shape that has nothing to do with its initial form; it retains the memory of a passage, an experience, among many other threads in a tapestry. Each reconstituted thread, like each of the fragments of which it is made up, has a unique shape linked to the material's own memory.
These reconstituted threads are surprisingly fragile. They seem ready to fly away with the slightest breath. They need to be handled with the utmost care, so as not to detach or unravel. But they also bear witness to a force. That of the material that records events. A simple thread, like any other material thing, has a 'life of its own', a corporeal existence in the sense that any external event that constrains, injures or mutilates it transforms its integrity.9 The shape of each of these threads seems immutable, frozen forever. We like to imagine that material memory resists the ravages of time. Will the thread relax over time, no longer constrained by the weaving from which it came? Or should we not rather think that a body marked by wear, wounded, mutilated, never forgets what it has recorded deep down inside?
The multiplicity of threads collected also highlights a persistent desire, to preserve a patrimony, to maintain an object in its entirety as best one can over the centuries. In spite of, and more probably because of, their very small size - they are almost nothing - these fragments of threads, these remains, resist. They persist in 'still being'10 and they seem to be trying to say something. Having outlived their usefulness filling holes and gaps in the weave, they become 'transmitters of history'.11 They tell something and fill in another gap - a narrative gap.
'Fragmentation is a conservative operation. Fragments are not fragile : the smaller they become, the more they resist.' Aurelia Monacu
(Translation by the author)
In the installation Archaeology (2023), these threads that I pieced together end to end are transformed into words, writings, and spontaneously draw sentences on the wall. And this is perhaps where the artist's work differs from that of the archaeologist : the transformation of the material collected into another object, of a poetic nature. As well as reminding us of the intimate links between text and textile, thread, line and trace,12 they make visible a contrasting history of attachment and detachment. They are as much the trace of the hands that once repaired a fault or a gap in the tapestry, as of the contemporary hands that extracted them from the weave and let them fall to the ground, or of the artist's hands which sought to gather, reconstitute and link them together.
