Maki Raaphorst

BEAR Fine Art

Bachelor

Maki Raaphorst photo 1 — The first gift made for someone who cares, can I cause a chain of gift exchange? Or was the chain of gift exchange already there, and was this just a reciprocation of a previous gift I hadn’t registered as such?

Does it remind you of home? Does it make you uncomfortable that I spent hours upon hours knitting this for you? Making stitch after stitch, counting in my head all the rows, keeping track of the pattern, all for you? Or does it make you feel at home, all this time that I spent for you? Would you be willing to help me? To take care of this project together?

If I make something that’s meant to be shared, could it become a gift that will always be given back and forth? Could it be a materialisation of reciprocity itself, or would it be something else, a tool to create reciprocity?

An approximate translation of the Dutch verb ‘dragen’:

1. To wear (a garment, a home, a dwelling, the responsibility of care, a role, out)

2. To carry (a garment, yourself, a burden)
3 . To hold (a garment, a memory, ancestral knowledge, on)

I know this thread can act in the formation of relationships, so what happens if it’s only me and the thread, instead of me, the thread and someone else?

He set out on a journey to approach the meaning of care. He first found himself among attention and devotion. He explored a little, and then wandered onto family relations. He started wondering whether they are supposed to care. He took a little walk in the direction of forcing them to care, he tried to make them softer by knitting for them, knitting with them, until he realised that maybe, if they don’t care, it would make more sense to shift direction to those who do. He wondered why these people did care and found himself wandering through the connections of gift exchanges. Some gifts found their way back to him, some didn’t. To take care of the gifts that got lost, he wondered, can a path be created so that a gift will always be reciprocated?

What will happen if two friends, who already have intricate relationships, connect through a thread?

So much dwells within a practice of knitting. There is the history of the material itself, and where it’s from. Did this fiber come from a sheep? Where did the sheep live? Who dyed it, and with what plants? Where did they grow? Then, there is the history of the practice, countless women who knitted sweaters for countless fishermen, following roughly the same pattern, customizing it to suit the specific fisherman, following a pattern based on the hometown he’s from. I wanted to get to know this form of caring for another, to experience being a woman, knitting a sweater for a fisherman. But what if I am not a woman? What if I don’t have a fisherman to knit for? What if I don’t have a hometown to base my patterns on?

Dragen, relating to a sweater in a different way

Deze pagina is voor het laatst gewijzigd op 27 mei 2022

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