Althea Rao - Ground Ensemble

left: handmade bobbin lace by Layla Klinger
right: ground ensemble rehearsal at electronic textile camp in 2023 at Vicksburg Michigan

Ground Ensemble is a 1-2 hour movement-based performance in which fifty or more participants use their bodies to map the landscape by weaving ground patterns of a large-scale lace. This will take place outdoors on an open field. Carrying long strands of yarns on their torso, the participants will slowly work their way forward by interlacing with one another. The resulting lace will be held in place by aesthetic and relational intersections formed by individuals’ constant negotiation of pathways, at the same time outlining pockets of open spaces, known as holes.

left: handmade lace by Layla Klinger
right: animated gif showing the lace design as a group choreography with pattern finding algorithm in the view of computer vision

It is important to pay attention to holes. Before lace, holes existed in the context of cloth. Unintentional holes on cloth were caused by material wear and degradation. Controlled, aesthetic holes as a form of embellishment were made on cloth retroactively by defining embroidered borders and removal of excess. Historically, intricate hole-ful cloth communicated wealth and power for the people who could afford to own them. The production of such embellished cloth was a means for the poor and/or colonized to make a living.

In the early 16th century, lace was developed in Europe as a laborious, additive process of “punto in aria”, Italian for “stitching in air”. Compared to previous ways of aesthetic hole making, lace required much less material, and the holes’ independence from a pre-existing cloth backing opened up possibilities for design and imagination. In other words, both the lace design and the outlined holes were freed from the grid structure of woven cloth; rather, both the holes and the lace design could be made by strategic placement and tensioned movement of threads.

This level of profoundly freeform cloth making was the result of gradual technical innovation developed by generations of lacemakers who rarely could afford to embellish themselves with the lace they made. Marginalized by the established social fabric and excluded from uneven distribution of wealth, the artisans’ deep relationship with and appreciation of materiality motivated them to look for new ways to build and define holes and a new form of governing system of threads that were meaningful to them.

handmade lace by Althea Rao

In lacemaking, ground is integral to the lace, as a foundation network of threads featuring intricate mathematical networks of repeating units. Instead of relying on a pre existing piece of cloth, lace is self-defining and self-supportive thanks to the ground. The two main types of lacemaking are needle lace (using a single thread and a needle) and bobbin lace (using many threads and bobbins). Meshing Grounds specifically references bobbin lace, in which many threads are involved, each wound on a pair of bobbins. Pins and bobbins are used to arrange and hold tension of threads, forming patterns and holes, as organized and moved by the lacemaker's hands. In Meshing Grounds, instead of being guided by the lacemaker’s hands, participants will act as self-organizing bobbins and pins who interlace themselves, initiating crossing and twisting from their different fields of vision and situatedness.

rehearsal performance at electronic textile camp at Vicksburg Michigan, 2023

In Meshing Ground, participants are individual lacing agents that interlace to form their own foundational social fabric while defining open spaces that are important to them. No one exists outside this fabric, as each bobbin and pin plays a role in tension-keeping in order to govern the integrity of the cloth. Unlike woven cloth which has a rigid structure featuring a binary system and repetitive motion of over and under, the logic of lace is incredibly flexible, allowing different forms of intersections and entanglement to take place simultaneously, and welcome new pairs of bobbins and pins to join in at any stage, as long as the lace is not finished. This collective lace resulting from the durational performance may help us meditate on ways individuals agents bound in the same social fabric negotiate visibility and invisibility through outlining spaces with their different, entangled lineages.

The performance of Meshing Grounds does not need to be anchored on a particular space; rather, anchoring and placemaking is part of the construction of the social fabric. On this map, holes and open spaces only exist in relation to the embodied traces held by tensioning individual agents that frame them, not to the surface underneath. While the pathways interwoven in this map traces our different, entangled lineages, the holes are fertile grounds of unstable and uncontrollable meanings, of potentials to perpetual becoming. This suggests a different kind of power and visioning practice that is available only to people who are on the ground and making the ground.

Our multitude of perspectives share these grounds. Individuals will negotiate how their different struggles coexist in a general state of struggling where a shared coalitional sense of love sustains us in making the lace, making shared space. Here, I refer to Audre Lorde’s “love” - a social erotics that energizes us “to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama”. My goal then for this performance is for participants to explore: how do we, as individuals tethered to our different pasts, interweave to embellish our presence by making grounds? And from there, how do we move to move forward?

Statement of Positionality

I am a Chinese person who is currently (2024) living in the United States. I left China 10 years ago when I realized that my government was actively rewriting the past to legitimize their governance into the future. Meanwhile, grassroots historians and documentarians – some in China, some in exile – never ceased their efforts to archive and fabulate alternative versions of historical narratives. Facing versions of highly politicized and contested histories to which my body belongs, elsewhere, I feel the weight and complexities of the past but am not sure where I am, or how to move forward. Nonetheless, within my field of vision, presence is where I am and forward is the only way to move.

My collaborator on this project is Layla Klinger. Layla has been living in Brooklyn since 2019 to pursue an MFA at The New School. Since graduating, they’ve been teaching textile and fashion studio practices. Layla has been active in the radical left in Israel/Palestine since they were 16, mainly involved in feminist, queer and anti-occupation organizing. Since migrating to the US, they have been fortunate to be a part of a New York-based network of critical textile makers and educators. Layla is part of a larger movement of Jewish, anti-zionist Israelis (many of them queer), and has recently helped found Shoresh: anti-Zionist Israelis in the US, a movement devoted to equality, healing, and reparations in Palestine/Israel.