The Flesh of History – Re-Enlivening the History of Textile Industries Through the Work of Kristina Müntzing

Abstract

Swedish artist Kristina Müntzing physically engages with archives of textile industries through manipulating, enlarging, fragmenting and re-constructing (re-weaving) photographs that she finds, as well as creating performances that explore the carnal aspects of this history. In this way, she makes connections between such embodied understandings and the political struggles of the time, which continues in different manifestations yet today. In this article, I make use of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of the flesh to discuss how Müntzing’s work brings embodied understandings to the remnants of this history. I also introduce the reflections of Walter Benjamin on relating to history through re-enlivening the past in the present. As Müntzing invigorates the somatic aspects of this history through her works, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology adds flesh to Benjamin’s discussion about the importance of re-enlivening history – and retaining those remnants of the past that contain the seeds of resistance against oppression.

Swedish artist Kristina Müntzing spent several years looking through archives relating to the textile industry in Sweden and the UK. She searched for used work clothes and other traces of the manual labour carried out in factories – without success. What she did find were countless images of buildings, objects and smiling people, as well as carefully stored examples of the textiles and clothes that were produced by these industries. In this article, I look at a number of strategies through which Müntzing re-enlivens the bodies and the manual labour that she finds missing in the archives.¹

Critically engaging with archives has been a trend in contemporary art practices over the last couple of decades.² In terms of engaging with the somatic aspects of archives, however, there are fewer examples. Notable reflections on the subject include Amelia Jones’ “Unpredictable Temporalities, The Body and Performance in (Art) History”, in which Jones presents an embodied art historical archive that embraces carnal human experience in relation to the notion of the archive, relating to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the reciprocal constitution of bodies and the notion of the flesh.³ Also, Diana Taylor has written about the rift between “the archive of supposedly enduring materials … and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge”, and the significance of overcoming this rift.⁴ For Taylor, in relation to archival engagements, it is crucial to “take seriously the repertoire of embodied practices as an important system of knowing and transmitting knowledge”.⁵

Picking up Taylor’s call, in this article, I return to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of the flesh to discuss how Müntzing’s work brings an embodied understanding to the skeleton of history that she finds in the archive. In her work, Müntzing physically engages with the archival material through manipulating, enlarging, fragmenting and re-constructing (re-weaving) the images that she finds, as well as creating performances that engage with an embodied understanding of this history. She also makes connections between such embodied understandings and the political struggles of that time, struggles that continue in different manifestations still today. In relation to this latter aspect of her work, I introduce the reflections of Walter Benjamin on relating to history through enlivening the past in the present. From this perspective, history gains its relevance not as a story of the past but in terms of how it affects us and is able to transform us in the present. In combining Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh with Benjamin’s version of material historicism, the intersubjectivity that informs the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty also becomes a political project. I argue that it is possible to draw attention to such experience in what might be called a political phenomenology. As Müntzing invigorates the somatic aspects of history through her works, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty adds flesh to Benjamin’s discussion about the importance of re-enlivening history – and remaining with those remnants of the past that contain the seeds of resistance against oppression.

The somatic archive

Kristina Müntzing spent one year researching the collections of the Textile Museum of Sweden in Borås.⁶ The collections include costumes, clothing, pattern samples, as well as photography and film. Müntzing describes how the artworks stemming from this research began with a sense of everything that was missing from this archive (perhaps in the majority of archives); a sense of the kind of knowledge that resides in the body.⁷ In the case of this particular archive, this involved the embodied knowledge of the women who worked in the textile industry – knowledge that inevitably disappears as these women get older and pass away. The questions that emerged were about: Who was involved in compiling the archive? Whose experiences and knowledge were included? Whose were not? Questions that are relevant to all archives. In relation to this particular material, the questions relating to the memory of this silent, embodied knowledge became all the more poignant.⁸

In the extensive archive of the Textile Museum, the visual documentation (the photographs and the films) primarily focus on the interiors of the industries. There are a few images of the women who worked in these industries, which mostly show the women in rows in the factories, busy at work. There is no focus on their individual processes or situations. Also, most of the images have no captions and are undated. Like most archives, this archive is incomplete, and the objects are not always as described. As mentioned above, Müntzing searched for work clothes that could reveal traces of the manual work that was performed in the industries, such as particularly worn clothing that would suggest certain repeated actions or movements. But the archives contained no work clothes, only examples of the products of their labour. Apparently, old work clothes were torn to shreds and made into rugs – not stored in the archive for future generations.

Until the 1930s, the Algots company, one of the largest textile industries in Borås, had employed seamstresses who worked from home. However, throughout the 1930s, production gradually moved into the factory. In 1931, a German engineer, Albert Sonntag, was hired and soon introduced the conveyor belt to the factory. This standardised the production process. As a result of his reorganisation, many of the more experienced seamstresses were fired and unskilled women were hired instead to work alongside the conveyor belt. The result was increased production but also a considerably worse working environment, as the employers had to adjust their pace to the speed of the conveyor belt.⁹ One of Müntzing’s works, Albert Sonntag Vs Somatic Archive (2018), shows a closeup of hands working at sewing machines (image 1). On the left is an unrecognisable archival image, shredded and woven together. We also see part of a piece of perforated paper. These perforations return in different forms in many of Müntzing’s pieces, as a reference to the punch cards that would be used as pattern instructions in the looms. Examples of such punch cards were amongst the objects found in the archive. Three images on the left show the same pair of hands at work at a sewing machine. Each image has been cropped differently and is also marked in the same spot with a yellow weaved pattern. These spots mark the areas where the repeated movements likely caused pain, drawing attention to the working conditions of the standardised production processes.

Another piece, Scrutching, Slubbing and Steaming (2018) begins with an archival image of women lined up in the factory, busy at work (image 2). The archival image itself is undated. However, from the appearance of the women, the photograph would seem to be from the 1930s. The piece comprises two parts. On the right is the archival image as a whole, duplicated and inversed, so that the top half mirrors the bottom half. The image is tinted in green and red, which matches colourful threads of vinyl that are arranged in different patterns across the images. On the left is a collage of images of closeups of the assembly line and of hands at work. While the focus of the actual archive, as mentioned, is not on the labour of the women, any details in the archival material that do convey this are highlighted in Müntzing’s pieces. In Scrutching, Slubbing and Steaming the images on the left show the conveyor belt, which appears to extend into the background, as well as the hands sewing the pieces of material that are being passed along the belt. While none of the images show the labour itself, these enlarged details, despite being still images, evoke a sense of the movements involved in the work process – the movement of the belt extending into the back of the space, as well as the movement of the hands repeating the sewing movements. As with many of Müntzing’s pieces, there is a connection between the labour of the women in the image and the physical act – of the artist or, as I describe below, of other women assisting her in this process in different ways – of shredding and re-threading the actual piece. This physical act is not a re-enactment, as the archive does not contain the acts of labour themselves to be reproduced, but only its external circumstances and its products. Rather, these works can be understood as being engagements, or embodied communications, with this history and with the women who performed this work.

Image 1. Kristina Müntzing, Albert Sonntag vs. Somatic Archive, 2018, Courtesy of the artist.

Image 2. Kristina Müntzing, Scrutching, Slubbing and Steaming, 2018, Courtesy of the artist.

In the piece Hand me Downs (2019) Müntzing would receive help from local women experienced in working with textiles to re-weave an archival image (image 3). The photograph, which she enlarged and printed on vinyl, shows a close up of a woman’s hands working at a sewing machine. Unlike the other photographs with which she worked, the original photograph is a colour print. In the finished piece, much of the image is shredded, leaving only small parts of the woman’s hands and the material (which has a skin-like tone) to be seen. Most of the shredded areas have been re-weaved – by the hands of the local women – with black vinyl or with the flesh-coloured tone of the original photograph. Documentation from the weaving process (image 4) shows the hands of the women reaching over the vinyl print, their skin tones blending with the hues of the archival image.

Image 3. Kristina Müntzing, Hand me Downs, 2019, Courtesy of the artist.

Image 4. Local women weaving the work Hand me Downs, 2019, Courtesy of the artist.

In the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the notion of flesh is described as “the formative medium of the object and the subject”.¹⁰ It is understood as something that exceeds individual bodies. What is available to vision is only a small part of what the notion entails. It involves not only all that is perceived, but also all that is possible and the entire “atmosphere” within which these possibilities reside. By also describing thoughts and imagination as emanating from this primordial element of the flesh, in this phenomenology, every act and interaction becomes always and necessarily a “carnal relation”.¹¹ In Hand me Downs, the flesh of the history to which it relates – flesh both in its literal sense and in the phenomenological sense of Merleau-Ponty – is conveyed through several different layers, in the close up of the original image, in the physical work of the women re-weaving the image together, and in the final piece, in which the skin tone and the tone of the material with which the woman is working blend together in an abstraction, which offers little in terms of information about the archival image itself, but which gives a strong sense of a body – and flesh – at work. Similarly, in the pieces above, while the archive itself contains little information about the physical work of the industry, the details it does contain are filled with an atmosphere of flesh through the physical shredding and re-weaving of the images in different ways and by different hands. In this way, the notion of the flesh helps us to hone in on what makes Müntzing’s approach to the archive different from that of other artists that critically engage with archives, such as, perhaps most commonly, the institutional critique of artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Fred Wilson. While Müntzing’s approach also can be said to involve a kind of institutional critique, this critical position is inseparable from the focus on the carnal aspects of archival knowledge.¹² Rather than turning to Michel Foucault’s reflections around archives, and the many discussions of archives in art history and visual-culture studies that have stemmed from it, I argue that a phenomenology of perception is needed to engage with the particular kinds of understanding made available through Müntzing’s work.¹³

In Jones’ chapter in Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, mentioned above, she writes about how Merleau-Ponty’s 1961 essay “The Intertwining – the Chiasm”, where he develops his notion of the flesh, was highly influential to many Euro-American artists in the 1960s. Within in the early 21st century’s focus on relational aesthetics, however, these ideas have been largely forgotten. In her text, Jones briefly mentions the notion of the flesh in relation to the potential for performance to put pressure on history writing and art critical value systems, as a way of directing our attention to “the interrelatedness of bodies and subjects in space and time”.¹⁴ The rest of her engagement with Merleau-Ponty, however, is focused on the notion of the chiasm, as a way of focusing on the ambiguous status of our bodies as both subject and object. In order to understand the kind of engagement with the past that we find in Müntzing’s work, my argument is that there is more to gain in returning to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh. Furthermore, while Jones’ focus is on how these notions can help us understand what performance does to our understanding of Art History (as a corrective to that which relational aesthetics has missed or misunderstood), my focus here is on what Müntzing’s (and others’ that engage with somatic aspects of the archive) work brings to our understanding of particular parts of history in general, as well as how understandings of historical events and their remnants reverberate into the present. Nevertheless, while our focus is different, these sentences found in the concluding parts of Jones’ text, is highly relevant to both our pursuits: “It makes sense, I think, to return to this thickness of the body, as articulated through durationality and phenomenological notions of embodiment, in order to understand how things from the past, available through traces in the present, come to mean”.¹⁵ With reference to both Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson, she highlights the importance of remaining with the depth of embodied experience when engaging with the remains of (art) history, rather than hastily moving to a conceptual understanding of what such traces might mean.¹⁶

The flesh of history

As in the examples above, in many of Müntzing’s works, archival images have been edited on a computer, enlarged and printed on vinyl, and then physically deconstructed and reconstructed in different ways. The process becomes a defragmentation (and, in turn, a rebuilding) of both the images themselves and of the history to which they relate. Like memory itself, the image disintegrates and is then pieced back together into something slightly altered. The new version reveals different connections between images and different aspects of history. In the piece Puls (2019), these connections are about women’s labour and working with thread that appears in different parts of the archival material (image 5). The piece is a triptych and comprises three archival images of different origins. The image on the left is of female textile workers at the Algots factory in Borås, which was found in the archive of the Textile Museum of Sweden. Once again, the image is not dated but its details would suggest it is from the 1930s. It shows women with piles of textiles seated in rows next to a conveyor belt. The women are busy sewing together pieces from the piles. In Müntzing’s version, the image has been manipulated into a kaleidoscope in which the rows of workers are spread out in different directions, disappear into the horizon, and then reappear both upside down and reversed. As in the other images in the piece, the vinyl on which it is printed is threaded and weaved together in patterns that appear to echo the work of the women in the images, but also the patterns that are seen at the bottom of each part of the triptych. Inspiration for these parts comes from the research of Lilly Zickerman, who travelled to homes and churches in Sweden between 1914 and 1931 documenting local lacework. The middle image is from the Asea factory, a manufacturer of electric lights and generators in Västerås, Sweden, in which female workers would insert electrical thread into generator motors. Women would be assigned these tasks as their hands were smaller. Today, the art museum in which the piece has been shown is housed in the same building that once housed Asea. Like the first image of the triptych, the archival image from Asea has been manipulated into a kaleidoscope, shredded and then weaved back together. In the lower half of the piece, black vinyl threads create a pattern that once again echoes the lacework at the bottom. The third image is of female computer programmers in the UK during the Second World War, working with threads to try to break the German communication codes. Here, a similar kind of kaleidoscope is created, although the pattern of the vinyl that has pieced together is more basic, creating a more geometrical and code-like pattern. The lacework at the bottom of the third image is also more basic and more geometrical.

Image 5. Kristina Müntzing, Pulse, 2019, Courtesy of the artist.

In the physical shredding and re-weaving of the archival images there is a refusal to approach photographs, or history itself, for that matter, as a flat surface. As in the pieces described above, there is a reaching out for the somatic parts of the archives – the work that the archives she is looking at aims to memorialise, but which also remain mostly invisible amongst the archived images and material – through physically engaging with the material.

In Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, the ambition was to construct a history of early capitalist society by rescuing the visual traces of this era, which he saw as the fore- or ur-history of our own time.¹⁷ Rather than constructing a linear story of events, the aim was a construction of history that looks backwards from the present moment to the images of the past in order to rescue these images, not from oblivion but from out of the “fictional and falsifying narratives” that they would otherwise be conceived within. Expanding on Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image, which is at the heart of his project, Susan Buck-Morss compares its appearance to Marcel Proust’s ideas around involuntary memory, in which sensuous cues encountered in everyday life evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort.¹⁸ In Benjamin’s dialectical images, which we find both in his Thesis on history and the unfinished Arcades Project, history emerges out of a dialectical encounter between disparate fragments of historical experience, creating a tension by juxtaposing two temporalities. Buck-Morss focus is different from my aim here, as most of her endeavour is dedicated to untangling the notion of the dialectical image.¹⁹ However, her reference to Proust’s involuntary memory reveals what I see as latent in Benjamin’s theory, which is connected to the refusal to engage with the images as a flat surface and reaching out for its somatic aspects.

In Benjamin’s famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, the philosopher describes the object of the painting as the Angel of History, who gazes at the wreckage of the past as he is blown away by a storm.²⁰ In this allegory, history is perceived altogether differently from the linear and progressive convention of traditional history making. Rather, in Benjamin’s allegory, the angel looks backwards from the present moment to the images of the past with a desire to rescue these images from the falsifying narratives within which they would otherwise remain.²¹ Rather than a chronological narrative of history, Müntzing’s engagement with the archives can be understood as a meeting with the “debris of history” that Benjamin’s angel observes. As Benjamin states, the angel of history “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”, but the storm that has caught his wings makes this impossible.²² In Müntzing’s physical engagement with the archival material, there appears to be a similar desire to remain with the debris of this history, to awaken aspects of that which has been dead and to make a new whole out of its remnants. In this process, there is a movement closer to the history to which the archive relates, but also a movement away from it, or of being pushed away from it. Time and all that is missing in the archive makes it impossible to re-enliven and make whole the past itself. While the physical engagement, the shredding and re-threading of the enlarged images and the repetition of the documented lace patterns gives an embodied sense of the manual labour that was once performed in these different circumstances, there is nevertheless a gap between this history and its engagement that can never be closed.

In a text written for one of Müntzing’s exhibitions that contained the works described above, it is claimed that “her view on history, political movements, actions and events, is not the antiquarian or cataloguing archival, but the activist”.²³ The particular history that is catalogued in the archive no longer exists and can no longer be accessed in in its original form. Nevertheless, the re-engagement with this history reveals the extent to which the struggle is not over. It is a struggle that affects different bodies in different locations. Today, a large part of the textile industries are found in South East Asian countries, where working conditions remain challenging in general, including poor occupational safety and health, long and intense working hours, as well as violations of fundamental rights at work. Female employees are overrepresented among the sector’s low pay workers, and countries with the lowest shares of female workers also have among the highest gender pay gaps in the garment sector.²⁴ As such, it is not a repetition of history but rather a reminder of the ways in which this history lives on today. As Benjamin’s notions of the dialectical image reveals, the physical engagement with the archive is not only a reaching back to the past, but a dynamic connecting of the past and the present. Below, I expand on the notion of political phenomenology as a way of combining Benjamin’s dialectical image with the depth that the notion of the flesh brings to the experience of the traces of the past.²⁵ If, as Jones argues above, Merleau-Ponty has been overlooked in relation to addressing the carnal aspects of artists engagements with the archive, I suggest that this is even more the case with Benjamin.

Performing memory

In many of Müntzing’s works, connections between different times in history and different geographies are made through the titles, juxtaposed images and materials used. Before her work on the history of the textile industries in Sweden, Müntzing carried out research into these industries in Lancashire, Manchester, as well as other places in the UK. The title of the piece Monday Fever (2017) refers to the disease, also known as Brown lung disease or Byssinosis, which was caused by exposure to cotton dust in the factory (image 6). The title alludes to how the symptoms of this disease were often worse on Mondays and would then diminish during the week as tolerance developed. Also this piece comprises an archival photograph – showing rolls of material in a factory – shredded and re-threaded into new patterns. Here, however, the artist has also included bast fibres, as a reference to the triangular trade system which, for many years, connected the British textile industry with the transatlantic slave trade. Another piece carries the title Brown Lung (2018). Here, an image from the British textile industry is used, of a woman standing by a weaving machine in a cotton mill. Above the image is a piece of material in which vinyl is being weaved with bast. The material hangs down over the images forming two brown round shapes over the weaving machines, which resonate further as a result of the title of the piece. Yet another piece, in which the archival images of cotton reels in the factory is weaved together with bast, is called Cottonopolis (2018), referring to Manchester’s nickname as the centre of the cotton industry. Furthermore, the piece called Kissing the Shuttle (2018) shows an archival image from Müntzing’s research in Manchester of a woman working with cotton reels on a weaving machine. The title of the piece is the term used to describe how weavers used their mouths to pull thread through the eye of a shuttle when the pirn was replaced. Many weavers would use the same shuttle, and in addition to spreading disease, this practice was thought to cause or worsen the condition of Brown Lungs.

Image 6. Kristina Müntzing, Brown Lung, 2018, Courtesy of the artist.

In all of these pieces, while the act of shredding and re-weaving re-enlivens the histories to which they refer, making them relevant and meaningful within the present, the referencing of the titles and the materials used creates associations between the past and the present, as well as between different situations and locations. At the same time, what the archives reveal about these histories (and what archives in general tend to reveal about particular histories) are fragmented pieces, just like the works themselves are fragmented and reconstructed into different “wholes”. As Buck-Morss writes, the visual traces of the past carry “discontinuous” ideas because, even if they involve the same concepts, they do not create a full picture.²⁶ Certain aspects remain of the embodied knowledge involved in this history, which are more difficult to convey through working with the limited material of the archive itself. As an expression of the somatic aspects of the archive – or the missing somatic information in the material – when her work was exhibited in Borås, Müntzing also made a choreography, Performing Memory (2019), for a performance to be acted out in the exhibition space amongst the different pieces (image 7). The performance involves four women dressed in simple grey and black work clothes. Together with many enlarged props – needles, buttons and pieces of material – and to the repetitive sound of machinery at work, the women carry out different kinds of repetitive movements, similar to the movements that would take place in a factory. At the beginning and end of the performance, the women massage and stretch their necks, backs and wrists, as they would after working for some time with the repetitive movements characteristic of factory work. Included in the performance are also sentences describing Müntzing’s own reflections on working in the archive: Of thinking about all that is not there and who is responsible for making the decisions about what should be included and what should not be included: Row after row in the collections, white gloves, protective boxes, silk paper, who decides, what is here.²⁷ Of the women themselves – who performed the work that the archive and the museum is supposed to store and portray – missing: Who are the women who did this work and had an entire museum and a collection of their work but who are not here themselves?²⁸ Of 140,000 (or 1,400,000?) unnamed photographs of buildings, objects, smiling people. Of the impossibility of organising everything that is stored in the archive. And of the impossibility of reaching the women who worked there: Meeting you who were there then and now in the museum and you are not there not what you are able to do what you remember what you did.²⁹

Image 7. Kristina Müntzing, Performing Memory, 2019, film still from performance recording, Courtesy of the artist.

Rather than being an archive of objects, what the performance expresses can be understood as an archive of somatic memories. In his reflections on phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty writes about those ideas or that understanding of the world that are not a reduction of embodied experience. It is a mistake, he suggests, to think that significant knowledge about the world can be achieved through “translat[ing] into disposable significations a meaning first held captive in the thing and in the world itself”.³⁰ While claiming that every effort to understand something is inevitably a distancing or a detachment from embodied experience, Merleau-Ponty explains how the common mistake (of the philosopher, the researcher, etc.) is to remain in this remote position, and assume that this is the space from which a meaningful understanding can be achieved. Correcting this “error”, he writes about the necessity of “falling back” into undivided carnal experience, that “spatial and temporal pulp where individuals are formed by differentiation”, or that inter-mundane space in which understanding has not yet been reduced to abstract ideas.³¹ As he puts it, “ideas that are too much possessed are no longer ideas” but are just a skeleton of an understanding that resides in the embodied and the incarnated.³² Performing Memory, like the physical acts of shredding and re-weaving the images, can be understood as “de-possessing” the ideas in question– and re-situating them in embodied experience. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History longs to stay, reawaken the dead and make whole that which has been disintegrated, these acts bring back the flesh to the skeleton of information kept in the archive. There is a re-enlivening of the missing somatic aspects of the archive – but at the same time we are reminded of the impossibility of actually awakening the dead or of really embodying the flesh of this history. As mentioned above, in the movement to get closer, at the same time there is also a movement away.

Building on the limited material of the archive, the performance allows certain aspects of the embodied knowledge involved in this history to be “fleshed out”. At the same time, there are aspects of Müntzing’s works that do not align altogether with the theoretical lenses of Merleau-Ponty (and Benjamin). Here it is helpful to turn also to Peggy Phelan’s discussion about the archive in relation to performance, in which the latter is defined through disappearance: “Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance”.³³ Thus, performance is described as being opposed to the documenting and preserving intention of the archive. However, as performance theorist Rebecca Schneider points out, disappearance can be seen as a defining characteristic of both performance and archive – they just materialise differently. The archive itself is described by Schneider as “a social performance of retroaction”, a performance which talks back to actions of the past, in which not only disappearance, but also forgetting, loss and exclusion are defining features.³⁴ In the fleeting shape of a performance, Müntzing draws attention to (re-enlivens, even) those very aspects of the archive that have been lost, forgotten or excluded.

A political phenomenology

Another of Müntzing’s performances involves a reference to a woman called Bessie Dickinson who, in her research in Manchester, Müntzing discovered to be the last woman to speak the language of “mee-mawing”. This language was developed by female textile workers in Lancashire in order to communicate amidst the noise of the weaving machines. In “mee-mawing”, ordinary speech is replaced by gestures and miming, like a kind of choreography. This permitted both daily and practical conversations, as well as communication about political issues, without drawing the attention of the factory supervisors. In addition to working at the mills, Dickinson was also a radical communist, although little of her political work has been documented. In Müntzing’s archival research in Lancashire, she found connections between the development of “mee-mawing” and female cotton workers’ suffrage activism, as well as the involvement of Lancashire women in radicalism, which stretches back as far as the early nineteenth century. In the archive, Müntzing found an image and a short clip of Dickinson “mee-mawing”. The archival image shows Dickinson lifting her head from her work and miming something and making a large gesture with her mouth. In the piece Fan, Bessie Dickinson (2016), this image has been enlarged and printed on large fans (image 8). The fans are perforated in different patterns that are redolent of the punching cards for the weaving machines that are also included in many of her works. The patterns of perforations come across as some kind of code.³⁵ Also, the fan as an object has been used as a way of communicating secret messages in different circumstances.³⁶ Using several of these oversized fans with images of Dickinson, Müntzing also created the performance Mee-mawing (2016), in which five dancers move around the room in ways that bring to mind the repetitive movements of factory work (image 9). However, in conjunction with the oversized fans, lifting the fans and swaying them back and forth, at times, these movements also become poetic and dream-like – reminiscent perhaps of those moments in the monotony of work when the mind drifts and you start to daydream. As in the performance described above, what is brought to flesh are those embodied aspects of the history that Müntzing found missing in her research.

Image 8. Kristina Müntzing Fan, Bessie Dickinson, 2016–17, Courtesy of the artist.

Image 9. Kristina Müntzing, Mee Mawing – Performance Lab, 2016, film still, Courtesy of the artist.

As described above, Benjamin proposes an engagement with history that is not the construction of a narrative of past events, but in which historical remnants – different kinds of images, objects and “debris” – are experienced as singular events in the present. From this position, the present moment is crucial, as a singular moment within which the past is not narrated as a linear story of events, but is perceived as an event in itself. Benjamin describes this experience as a moment in which thinking stops: “thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions”.³⁷ In such moments, thinking crystalises as a monad, as singular experiences freed from their connection to any linear narrative.³⁸ For Benjamin, it is only in this form that the past gains relevance, not only as a story of the past, but as knowledge and energy with the potential of affecting actions in the present. It is also in this way that history gains political relevance, not only as an archive of historical facts, but as a way of recuperating lost energies – energies that have the power to recognise oppression and occlusion in the past as well as in the present.

While Benjamin does not expand on the phenomenology of this experience, the focus on its singularity in the present – as a moment in which thinking stops – suggests that this is an embodied experience resulting from an interaction with a particular materiality.

The ideas of Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, are highly instrumental in clarifying the mistake and the loss involved in reducing knowledge and understanding to a distanced and detached view of the world from above. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty remains in his language with the generalising and neutralising notions of Being and the yet more evasive notion of the flesh, to refer to non-reduced embodied experience. What he omits from his discussion is an account of how oppression and occlusion are grounded in “the spatial and temporal pulp” of pre-discursive experience. The notion of a political phenomenology comes from combining the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty with Benjamin’s version of material historicism.³⁹ In this way, the embodied experience to which Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology draws attention is intrinsically interconnected with the power structures of particular historical times and places.⁴⁰ What returning to Benjamin and Merleau-Ponty adds to the discussion on the somatic archive is, on the one hand, an understanding of the experience of the traces of the past as a way of recuperating lost energies, and, on the other, the phenomenology of this experience as residing in the very formative medium within which subjectivity is created. As such, political phenomenology allows us to recognise both the differences between different political situations referenced in Müntzing’s works and, at the same time, the embodied energies that her work re-charges, which enables the possibility for connecting these disparate situations – and the way they link to the present.

Conclusion

Following Diana Taylor’s call to take seriously embodied practices as an important system of knowing and transmitting archival knowledge, in this article I have discussed two main ways in which Kristina Müntzing’s works seriously address the carnal aspects of critically engaging with archives. Firstly, because of her particular focus on the embodied experiences of the history that she addresses – the traces of which are only hinted at in the archives. Secondly, because of her method of physically working with this material or with the notions to which that they relate – through the manipulating, enlarging, shredding and reweaving of the images, or through creating performances that engage with this material in different ways. I have included Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh as a way of describing how these works bring an embodied understanding to the skeleton of the history that Müntzing searches for in the archive. I have described how such a perspective brings out the ways in which the different methods that she uses re-enliven the archival material with which she works – also including the missing aspects of this material. By following the traces of the (partly missing) information of this history, her works bring flesh to the skeletons of understanding that she has found and open up embodied understandings of the history of manual labour that these archives aim to preserve. What’s more, the connections and juxtapositions she uses brings a situated understanding of the different ways in which this history is not over, but still lives on in different locations and constellations today. Moreover, I have brought up Walter Benjamin’s reflections on relating to history in terms of enlivening the past in the present – as a way of recuperating lost energies that have the power to recognise oppression and occlusion in the past as well as in the present. As a way of combining these two philosophies, I have begun to discuss the possibility of a political phenomenology as a way of understanding Müntzing’s engagement with the archive – and, potentially, also other forms of somatic engagements with archives. I say “begun to discuss” as this is a discussion in which much remains to be said, and I see this article as an invitation to continue this discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In particular, I look at her engagement with the history of textile work in Sweden and the UK during the period between the two world wars. The research for this article was conducted as part of a larger research project, Interwar Lens Cultures, which is a collaboration between HDK -Valand Academy and the Institute for Cultural Sciences at Gothenburg University, and the Hasselblad Foundation, also in Gothenburg, Sweden. The aim of the wider project is to revisit and rethink the practices and meanings of lens-based visual cultures in the interwar years through a focus on hitherto under-researched connections between photography and film in Sweden and beyond. In my part of this research project, I approach this period through contemporary works that relate in different ways to this history, as well as through my own engagement with material from this time. For further information about the project, see https://www.gu.se/forskning/interwar-lens-media-cultures-1919-1939.

2 A few names could be mentioned including Inci Eviner and Gülsün Karamustafa (who work on archives that relate to Ottoman and Turkish history), Walid Ra’ad and the artist duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (that both relate to the destruction of Beirut during the civil war), and Lina Selander (who works on archives relating to a collective European history). In my recent book, I look at the work of all these artists from an affective theoretical perspective. Erika Larsson, Photographic Engagements, Belonging and Affective Encounters in Contemporary Photography, Gothenburg, Makadam, 2018.

3 Amelia Jones, “Unpredictable Temporalities: The Body and Performance in (Art) History”, Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, ed. by Rune Gade and Gunhild Borggreen, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2013.

4 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 19.

5 Taylor, 2003, p. 26.

6 The city of Borås and its surroundings have been a centre of the textile industry for centuries. Although the textile factories have since closed, Borås is still known as the textile capital of Sweden. On the site of the old weaving factories there is now a Textile Fashion Centre, which contains the Textile Museum. The University of Borås also contains the Swedish School of Textiles.

7 This and other descriptions come from conversations with the artist in June 2020.

8 Questions relating to the silences, empty spaces and creative potential of archives have also been explored within queer art through the work of Ann Cvetkovich, Mathias Danbolt and others. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Duke University Press, 2003 and Mathias Danbolt, Touching History: Touching History: Art, Performance, and Politics in Queer Times, University of Bergen, 2013.

9 Sonntag stayed at Algots until 1942 and, in addition to his work at the textile factory, he also became the local leader of the Nazi movement in the area. See Mats Segerblom, Algots: en teko-koncerns uppgång och fall, Stockholm: Liber Förlag, 1983.

10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lefort, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, Evanston Ill, Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 147.

11 Furthermore, what this perspective allows him to do is recognise the extent to which any conceptual division (between the objects and the subject, between the real and the imagined, and between the image and space) is a construction after the fact. This is not to say that they are false; as Merleau-Ponty makes clear, the very idea of falsifying a fact is only made possible after having left the carnal experience and lost “faith in the perceptual”. Rather, the significance lies in the recognition that these divisions are not traits of situated space itself, but are conceptual partitions, which at times have been useful for a certain type of dialogue about relations in the world, but which need to be discarded as new and more fruitful understandings emerge.

12 It is important to recognize how Müntzing works within a tradition of feminist and textile art, which includes numerous examples of how women’s work have been thematized, but without being foremost interested in the carnal aspects of archival knowledge. To mention some names included in this traditions, one could bring out scholars like Maria Elena Busczek, Jane Collins, Kirsty Robertson, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Roszika Parker, and Jessica Hemmings, and by artists like Sascha Reichstein, Zoe Sheehan Saldana, Lisa Oppenheim, Lisa Vinebaum, Janis Jeffries, Anne Wilson, Suzanne Bocanegra and the book The Object of Labor: Art Cloth, and Cultural Production, ed. by Joan Livingstone, The MIT Press, 2007. In a Swedish context, one could mention the work of the artist Maria Adlercreutz and her tapestry “Hanna Keller, textilarbeterska på Tuppens fabriker i Norrköping 1920”, 1994 and the exhibition “Verkligheten sätter spår (Reality makes traces)”, 1975–1976 at Röhsska Museet, Gothenburg, where looms and sewing tables were installed in the exhibition room.

13 While Foucault does locate the body in the archive, for instance, in Discipline and Punish, he does not engage directly with somatic experience. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

14 Jones, 2013, p. 63.

15 Jones, 2013, p. 70.

16 The reference to durationality comes from Henri Bergson’s concept of duration, which he first introduced in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1889, Dover Publications, 2001.

17 The unfinished Arcades Project was reconstructed and analysed by Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, The MIT Press, 1991.

18 For Benjamin, the dialectical image is the primal phenomenon of history. Ibid and Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (also referred to as On the Concept of History), https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html, accessed 1 November 2019. The reference to Proust in found in Buck-Morss, 1991.

19 As is that of Miriam Hansen who, in her recent scholarship on Walter Benjamin, is more interested in his notion of the aura or his critique of modernity. Cinema and Experience, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, University of California Press, 2011; and “Benjamin’s Aura”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34, No. 2, Winter 2008, pp. 336–375.

20 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

21 Significantly, Benjamin conceived of the remnants of history through a visual logic, and thus perceived of them as images whether they were verbally or pictorially represented.

22 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

23 Erik Berggren, Exhibition text for Code, The Museum of Work, Norrköping, 2018 (my translation).

24 Employment, Wages and Productivity, Trends in the Asian Garment Sector. Data and Policy Insights for the Future of Work. Report by International Labor Organization, 2022. The report focuses on countries with garment exporting industries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Viet Nam.

25 I have found the notion of political phenomenology also recently being used in Political Phenomenology, Essays in Memory of Petee Jung, edited by Hwa Yol Jung, Lester Embree, part of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology, Springer Cham, volume 84, 2016 and Political Phenomenology, Experience, Ontology, Episteme, ed. by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann, New York, Routledge, 2019. These publications focus more on how phenomenology can help reformulate central concepts in political theory.

26 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 1991.

27 Rader efter rader i samlingarna, vita vantar, skyddslådor, silkespapper, vem bestämmer, vad finns här (my translation).

28 Vilka är kvinnorna som gjort detta som fått ett helt museum och en samling över sitt arbete men själva inte finns här (my translation).

29 Möter er som var där då och nu i museet och ni finns inte där, inte det ni kan det ni minns det ni gjorde (my translation).

30 Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968, p. 36.

31 Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968, p. 114.

32 Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968, p. 119.

33 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 146.

34 Rebecca Schneider, “Performance Remains”, Performance Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2001, p. 104.

35 Code is also the title of an exhibition at the Museum of Work, Norrköping, in which these works were included.

36 In other pieces, Müntzing examines alternative forms of communication or “secret languages” in relation to socialist and politically radical movements. Before her work on the textile industry, in a project called Mapping Panther Politics (2014), she made connections between the activism of young people in the area of Biskopsgården in Gothenburg and the Black Panthers in the USA. She also made connections between the language of “mee-mawing” and Fankalo, a language that had been especially developed for the mines of South Africa and which is understood only by the initiated. In all cases, there is an engagement with different kinds of languages of opposition.

37 Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History, Thesis XVI.

38 Benjamin borrowed the notion of the monad from Gottfried Leibniz who developed his reflections on the concept in The Monadology. In Liebniz’ understanding, monads are fundamental existing entities, understood through their singularity and indivisibility. For Benjamin, the significance of the notion lies in the possibility of encountering the entirety of a body, place or historical event through an engagement with a monad. See Nicholas Rescher N., G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991.

39 I have found the notion of political phenomenology also recently being used in Political Phenomenology, Essays in Memory of Petee Jung, ed. by Hwa Yol Jung, Lester Embree, part of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology, Springer Cham, volume 84, 2016; and Political Phenomenology, Experience, Ontology, Episteme, ed. by Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann, New York: Routledge, 2019. These publications focus more on how phenomenology can help reformulate central concepts in political theory.

40 Similarly, contemporary theorists like Jill Bennett and Ann Chetkovich bring our attention to the inseparability of affective (both as embodied and emotional) experience with particular political situations. Chetkovich, An Archive of Feelings; and Jill Bennett, “Migratory Aesthetics: Art and Politics beyond Identity”, in Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture Conflict, Resistance, and Agency, ed. by M. Bal and M. Á. Hernández-Navarro, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2011, pp. 109–126.