Room 002.16
Ana Torfs employs tapestries as a support for different layers of information, combining images and words in a device situated between evidence of craft and a suggestion of the mechanical. The series of works in this room evokes different cultural elements which, when combined, create an accumulation and alienation effect and enigmatically point to concepts such as travel, migration, work and conquering.
Torfs’ scenes are framed by a mechanical device with handles around the edges, inspired by an old illustration for Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The squares inside bear different images: compasses, sailboats, maps, fragments from photographs, prints, oil paintings, and pages taken from books from different epochs and geographies. As a consequence, the artist shows her interest in that which propounds wandering, movement or exchange, setting out principally from words conceived to be migratory. According to Torfs, “‘wandering words’ — a literal translation of the poetic German noun ‘Wanderwort’ — are a special kind of loan-word, a form that is widely circulated between numerous languages and cultures across a significant geographical area”. For each of these tapestries, Torfs chooses a “wandering word” associated with the history of colonialism and trade routes during the first globalisation period: ginger, saffron, sugar, coffee, tobacco and chocolate.
The tapestries were woven on a Jacquard loom, the first programmable machine — invented in 1801, it uses punch cards upon which designs in a binary format are woven, allowing any designed pattern to be obtained. As with the fictional machine in Gulliver’s Travels, the loom is a precursor to the modern computer.