We are thrilled to launch the second issue of The Vessel, this time with a focus on textiles and fibres. With the title Re-acting Fibres, this issue has as its springboard a series of works by Siri Hjorth and Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas. Norwegian Crafts’ curator Lars Sture invited the artist duo to create a work that could be disseminated digitally, and they responded with a short-film series titled Pitch, Prosess, Produkt. With satire, wit and a cast of striking characters, Hjorth and Makonnen Kjølaas dive into the world of contemporary textile art.

Following this, we invited Ida Falck Øien (associate professor of costume design and fashion design at Oslo National Academy of the Arts), Marcia Harvey Isaksson (textile artist, curator, exhibition designer, interior architect and the founder of Fiberspace, Stockholm), and Anne Dressen (curator at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris) to join Lars Sture in the editorial group. Taking the three films Pitch, Prosess, Produkt as a point of departure, they have commissioned the content for this issue: it deals with rethinking textiles and fibres in connection with materiality, sustainability and rural life.

I would like to offer a big thank you to the editors for bringing this issue together. Re-acting Fibres consists of Marianne Hultman’s interview with Mooky Dagan, who discusses the dancer, choreographer and artist Noa Eshkol, an essay by Carole Collet on the ability of textiles to restore planetary health, a visual essay by Adam Curtis featuring five Norwegian artists and designers who have left the city and embraced rural life, an essay by Oscar Tuazon and Dorothée Perret on Winona LaDuke’s hemp farm in Gaa-waabaabiganikaag in northern Minnesota, and a recorded conversation between the designers Linda Nurk and Natsai Audrey Chieza on how they engage with living systems and technology to build sustainable design practices.

Thank you to all the contributors and artists who have made Re-acting Fibres so rich in content. And thank you to Arts Council Norway and the Norwegian Embassy in Paris for supporting the production of Pitch, Prosess, Produkt.

by director Hege Henriksen, on behalf of Norwegian Crafts