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Material-discursive listening — to listen with textiles

Author: Charlotte Østergaard. Interview with Felicita Brusoni.

[Charlotte Østergaard, voiceover:]

Here I am in my studio with my wonderful companions: textiles. These particular textiles I have just washed and let’s start here with the story about theses red textiles that in 2017 was a knitted scenographic object in the performance STAFET. Since then, they – the textiles that constituted the scenographic object – have been stored.

STAFET (2017)

Concept and staging: X-Act / Kitt Johnson

While preparing these textiles to become the knitted scenographic object, I spent days – perhaps even weeks – cutting fabrics into long threads and each of these threads was then knitted into separate parts of the scenographic object, which were later connected for the performance. I chose a stretchable fabric with a soft grip, aiming to give the performers a warm, gentle tactile experience as they engaged with the textiles.

As it shows on the image at one point during the performance one of the performers continued to knit and the other eight performers engaged with the knitted object as well as that they interacted with the red thread.

As STAFET won’t be performed again and as X-Act/Kitt Johnson don’t have storage I was asked if I wanted the knitted object. I couldn’t say no. However, it was overwhelming to have the many parts of the scenographic object back as they suddenly took up my studio space.

At the same time, the time and care I had already invested in preparing and crafting the textiles, I was happy to see them again. I wanted to take care of them and prepare them for the possibility of being re-crafted. As part of this process, I decided to wash the threads, which required unknitting the scenographic object. So, each thread was washed, and in doing so they became completely entangled.

This entanglement introduced a particular kind of tension both in the material sense of threads pulling and resisting one another and as a form of (at)tention. The (at)tention was an awareness of that the threads could not return to their original state. Their previous life as a scenographic object lingered as a trace within the tangled mass. For me, these traces carry the memories of the performance, marking the threads as already shaped by their past.

So once again, here we are in my studio where I untangle the textile thread. As I untangle, I linger with the thread which means lingering with the memories of the performance and the interactions that occurred during the performance. However, it is not so much trying to remember the performance in detail. It is more lingering with the stories that to me are embedded in the textiles. Stories that include the crafting of the object and of the performers’ interactions with it.

As I am untangling the thread it feels as if I am touching the life of the textiles. For example, the traces that the performers have left in the textiles during the performances.

As I untangled the thread, I linger, and the lingering makes me drift. A drifting that often isn’t orientated towards something specific. A drifting where I become present with the act of untangling the thread – present with the textile materials, my non-human companions.

So, you can ask, what does the act of untangling a red thread have to do with material-discursive listenings?

Perhaps the simple answer is that if I don’t take my time, I will never be able to untangle the thread without destroying it. As mentioned, by lingering and drifting I become present with the textile thread. In lingering drifting, I listen to the stories that embedded in the textiles, and it is only when I listen, I become able to untangle the thread.

Still, how does the act of untangling a textile thread relate to listenings?

In my PhD thesis Crafting Material Bodies – exploring co-creative costume processes I studied how we (human) listen with costume and explored what these kinds of material-discursive listenings imply. As costume do not speak my claim is that in order to listening with costume whether it’s while crafting or wearing the costumes we must listen with our bodies—with our senses, feelings, hearts and imaginations. I use listening in the plural – listenings – to indicate that what when we listen, we don’t necessarily hear, sense, feel and imagine the same.

Like costume, textile materials don’t speak. Therefor the material-discursive listening that I am exploring isn’t literal but metaphorical and yet embodied – and its potentially more imaginative, playful and intuitive than analytical and reflective. The embodied listenings are states of becoming – of becoming in touch and becoming in motion with the material. Therefor when I enter a material-listening state I focus less on the thinking, less on the wording and the languaging, even less on the crafting.

Like here in the video, I focus on untangling the thread. At the same time, I don’t really the focus on the untangling the thread. What matters is that I give in to the act of untangling. Giving in implies that I am present with the textiles without pushing my presents on the textiles. It’s acts of listening-with the material though my hand and with my entire body – and as such the listening isn’t about finding meaning and therefore words become meaningless, useless or at least less relevant. In this listening state – that can become quite meditative – I ‘make kin’ (Haraway 2016) with and relate to the textile material as non-human companions.

And here with the kin making and relating to textiles as non-human companions I will take a little detour that isn’t a detour. The Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Løgstrup says “every one of us holds some of the life of the other in our hand. The Løgstrup quote is here translated by Eva Skærbæk. To hold someone’s life in your hands is an ethical stance or as Løgstrup puts it an ethical demand.

‘Every one of us holds some of the life of the other in our hand’ (Eva Skærbæk 2011, 44).

Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk write on Løgstrup’s ethical demand: ‘The ethical demand is radical, says Løgstrup, because I can never know if the way I choose to act will serve the other’s needs. I am responsible for the part of the life of the other that I hold in my hands on any occasion and for my own actions in response to each situation.’

‘The ethical demand is radical, says Løgstrup, because I can never know if the way I choose to act will serve the other’s needs. I am responsible for the part of the life of the other that I hold in my hands on any occasion and for my own actions in response to each situation’ (Eeg-Tverbakk 2021, 5).

So even though that my intentions and therefor my actions towards the other are well-meaning, I cannot know if my actions meet the needs of the other and I can never fully know how my actions will affect the life of the other. Still, I am responsible as my actions influence the life of the other. Building on Løgstrup Eva Skærbæk suggests that “we are interdependent in the sense that we influence each other with what we do and say and by what we do not say and do; we are each other’s authors.” As we are interdependent, I will affect the life of the other and the other will affect my life and as such we are each other’s authors.

‘We are interdependent in the sense that we influence each other with what we do and say and by what we do not say and do; we are each other’s authors” (Eva Skærbæk 2011, 44).

Løgstrup’s ethical demand is articulated in relation to human relationships. But what if this ethical demand extends to how we or I act toward—and affect—non-humans? What if I meet textiles as my non-human companions? And what if practices such as crafting and untangling become ways of making kin with them?

When I relate to textiles in this way, new questions emerge: How do I attend to the needs of these textile companions? And in what ways do we—human and non-human—participate in authoring each other’s lives? Here, authoring can suggest that I, as human, am not the sole creator of an aesthetic expression such as a scenographic object. The textiles themselves, as non-human companions and collaborators, play a critical role.

So here a dilemma arises. I can only interpret what my non-human companions might need. To take the ethical demand seriously, I must therefore make my intentions explicit – revealing how I understand what is being asked of me, and how I choose to respond.

Having initially purchased and used the textiles, I understand the ethical demand as being responsible for their continued life – making sure that the textiles continue to be in relation to something or someone. Thus, in this particular situation, my response is to untangle the threads in order to make re-crafting possible. As such, the ethical demand becomes tangible in practice. As here in the video, when I untangle the thread, I quite literally hold the textile companions in my hands. While they are in my hands, I touch them and they touch me. The quality of this touch matters: if I am impatient, that energy will affect my touch as well as that my impatience will bounced between us—the thread and me—with the effect that what I will experience is most likely my own impatience. This energy can prevent me from being fully present with the textiles; I may miss how they affect me, and it will most likely also hinder my ability to untangle the thread.

It is through this attentive reciprocal touch—through being touched and moved by the textiles—that I truly relate to them. Through the movements of touching and untangling, I become familiar with how to make kin with these non-human companions. In this relational process, I explore our ongoing interactions, which awakens curiosity and deepens my capacity to listen to them.

In holding the textiles in my hands, in the touching movement I listen with them. I listen to how they sensorially, emotionally and imaginatively touches me. As I am listening, I become present with the textiles as my non-human companions. Becoming present isn’t trying to become one. It is listening to how my hands moves the textiles and by moving with them I am moved. In the touching and moving ‘intra-action’ (Barad 2007) I relate and become in relationship with the textile material.

While I am untangling the thread, I relate to textiles as vital creative companions and as creative collaborators we are interdependent. As the textile companions cannot act independently a way that I act or respond responsibly is to give in to the embodied listening. In the embodied listening state, my skillfulness understood as how I master specific techniques is less important and it for sure isn’t about controlling the textiles by mastering specific techniques. Moreover, in order to enter an embodied listening state, I try not to focus on an outcome. Like here, when I untangle the thread, I do not focus on the goal of untangling the thread.

Perhaps material-discursive listenings is about storytelling. Listening to the relational stories that are embedded in the textiles. To respond responsibly is to care for the relational stories that textiles carry which I suggest implies caring for the past, present and future creative life of the textiles.

So, what happened with these red textile companions after I untangled them?

RED CARPET (2024)

Concept: Valentina Sechi

Created by: Felicita Brusoni and Valentina Sechi

A dear colleague soprano, vocal performer and artistic researcher Felicita Brusoni approached me as she – in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Valentina Sechi – was in the process of creating the performance RED CARPET. I meet them, bringing the untangled red thread. Without any sketch and with Felicita, Valentina and the red textiles as my creative companions and collaborators I, on site, knitted a new scenographic object this time a red vulva.

Perhaps you can say that I, once again, push my intention on the textiles as I knitted yet another scenographic object. However, crafting the textile companions into something new offered them a new context, a new life, new relationships which is my ways of showing the textile companions that I care for them and that I honor them as creative partners.

I was curious to explore what kind of relationship Felicita build to the textile companions. Therefor I asked her to share her experiences with the knitted scenographic object; the red vulva – that she in the interview also called it, he, and the knit.

RED CARPET (2024)

Concept: Valentina Sechi

Created by: Felicita Brusoni and Valentina Sechi

[Felicita Brusoni:]

Between the two, me and Valentina, I was the one that most of the time was connected to the vulva. Because at the beginning, I kind of get my life out of it, because I go through it and I really feel it from the kin, the body, because I must pass through it. And it’s like a birth because I’m really getting through the two vulva shapes and then everything changes because I’m born after that. And even the sensation, it’s something, it gives birth to my voice.

We started to feel like that was the third character in the performance. Let’s say I was the voice or the oral part. The auditory part. Valentina was the body, the really embodied part and the textile probably was the touching part.

For me, I’m very sound person, so it seemed like he [the vulva] was talking to me, telling me things, and it really changed the sound around because it was there. Changing shape. Changing sound.

[Charlotte:]

I think it’s very interesting you’re saying that it changes the sound, or it changes your sound or informs your sound. Can you say a little bit more about that?

[Felicita:]

You know, the kind of fabric gave me the sensation of being soft but at the same time very elastic. It made me think, well, maybe transform my voice in the same way. Sometimes you should be soft, but also a little bit rough. This elasticity and softness and also this, the knitted thing [the vulva]. I mean the knit is very wide. I don’t know the terms. It’s not very thin. It’s very wide. So, the first thing I try to do is: can I wear it and try to put the head and put the arms. It really was calling me in this sense. And what do you do when you have your head inside the knitted thing? What can you do? I don’t know, something very weird came out of it because of the whole image that I had with just the head inside it. I mean, the face and two hands, and it seems like a very old, I don’t know, archetypical vase or pot, where you have this strange thing coming out of the hands and the head.

So, I think a lot of times I had some knowledge out of it that I don’t know how to explain. But it gives me ideas. Sometimes it’s the fabric touching it. Also, I have my instrument embodied. Some sensation in the hands led me to some sensation in my imagination and how to express through my voice this touching sensation. I think that’s what happens most of the time.

And sometimes I was out of it, and I was looking at its different shapes and the way it is knitted. That gave me other information more in a compositional way. This is how it is designed, and probably I should follow this form when I do stuff, and that connects very well in some parts where you have clear forms, like when I have beatboxing. For me beatboxing is very regular and it’s kind of how it is knitted. It’s very regular. I mean, it’s not like random. You have lines. So sometimes I was inspired by the form it has. That for me was like a musical form, and sometimes it was just the fabric and the textile.

But also, when Valentina unravels it and I have it on my head, oh, that’s the coolest part, because she unravels the knitted part and little by little, I feel like if it was a liquid and that’s the only moment where I don’t sing. I’m completely silenced. She is completely silenced, only unraveling, going faster and faster. And I just feel it’s all about feeling. And I don’t even know if the audience feel the same thing, probably it’s just the visual part that they have, but they have the sensorial part. The very much the tactile part that I feel this thing going down my head.

[Charlotte:]

Of course, it did not have a sound, but it did in a way - in how you used it.

[Felicita:]

It did a voice. Yeah. This concept that I have of multivocality. It has a precise voice. Political voice and identity voice, it has a social voice. It represented different things in different moments inside the performance.

And since our performance talks about femininity, actually it represents a lot of things that has to do with femininity itself. Because it’s red, because it reminds of blood, because it has to do with the knitting. Not only because only women knit, but because it’s a thing that goes so far away in the past. The thing of knitting that really connects a lot of women everywhere in the whole world. We are connected by the threads.

[Charlotte, voiceover:]

In listening to Felicita, it is apparent that the vulva does not simply function as an object, but as a creative companion that resonate with her body. She describes a kind of vocal dramaturgy emerging in relation to it, where the knitted vulva takes on its own being. Her listening to it is not only auditory, but sensorial and visual; it is through her creativity that this resonance unfolds, shaping how her voice moves with and through the textile.

I find myself returning to how this resonance is felt in the body. How the textile vibrates in Felicita’s body, and how this, in turn, translates into her vocal expression. Her voice do not simply project onto the red vulva; rather, it seems to be in dialogue with object, as if the textile co-authors the vocality that emerge.

As an audience I experienced how Felicita and Valentina listen to and with the non-verbal language of the red vulva. Their way of listening touches me. I am moved by their material-embodied relationships with the knitted vulva and the stories that take shape through their interactions with it. It leaves me with the sense of that what the audience hear or experiences is not a fixed narrative, but something that arises through their interpretations of the relationships between Felicita, Valentina, and the red vulva; a shared, unfolding act of sense-making.

As textile materials don’t speak the material-discursive listenings that I have been exploring in this video essay is about responding and being responsible for how I – and others – care for the life of textiles. It matters that I respond responsibly here and now but also in the future. Therefore, once the RED CARPET performance no longer tours the textiles will return to me and once again it is my responsibility to offer the red textiles new lives and new relationships.

STAFET (2017)

Concept and staging: Kitt Johnson

Sound: Sture Ericson Light: Mogens Kjempff

Costumes/scenographic object: Charlotte Østergaard.

Co-creating performers: Dorothea Eitel, Kyrie Oda, Gabi Dissmann, Florent Golfier, Marek Mensik, Julienne Doko, Hilde I. Sandvold, Poul Helmer Laursen, Jan Vesala

Producer: Aline Storm

Intern: Nanna Hanfgarn Jensen

Production assistant: Sofie Berivan Hoffmann

Produced by Kitt Johnson X-act with support by the Danish Arts Foundation, Knud Højgaards Fond, Augustinus Fonden, Beckett-Fonden, Københavns Kommunes Scenekunstudvalg.

RED CARPET (2024)

Concept: Valentina Sechi

Created by: Felicita Brusoni, Valentina Sechi

Scenography: Charlotte Østergaard

thanks to the kind permission of X-Act/Kitt Johnson

Light design: Carolina Agostini

Production: Versiliadanza

Support: MiC, Region Tuscany, Municipality of Florence

Thanks to Inter Arts Center and Lund University

References

Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the universe halfway – quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, London: Duke university press.

Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant matter – a political ecology of things. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Eeg-Tverbakk, Camilla (2021). Perspectives on Ethics in Performance Practice, Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership Project 2018–2021, Output Phase #01 ‘Setting the framework’, Workpackage 2 ‘Map Ethics!’. Lead Partner: University of Bergen (Norway), Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design.

Haraway, Donna (2016). Staying with the Trouble – making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Skærbæk, Eva (2011). Navigating in the Landscape of Care: A Critical Reflection on Theory and Practice of Care and Ethics, Health Care Analysis, 19. 41–50.

Østergaard, Charlotte (2024). Crafting Material Bodies – exploring co-creative costume processes, PhD-thesis, Lund University.

Østergaard, Charlotte (2024). Listening with costume – a material-discursive practice. In (Eds) Marshall, Susan, Insubordinate Costume – inspiring performance. Routledge. 119–128.

Østergaard, Charlotte (2023). Listening through and with costume, Nordic Journal of Dance Volume. 14(1). 90–99.

Material-discursive listenings — to listen with textiles

Author: Charlotte Østergaard

Interview with Felicita Brusoni

Abstract

This video essay explores material-discursive listenings through embodied and co-creative relationships with textile materials as non-human companions. Building on the PhD thesis Crafting Material Bodies – Exploring Co-creative Costume Processes, the essay extends the notion of ‘listening with costume’ (Østergaard 2024) toward textile materials, arguing that such listenings unfold through touch, movement, senses, imagination, and presence rather than through verbal language.

The essay centers on a set of red textiles originally created as a knitted scenographic object for the performance STAFET (2017). After the performance ended, the textiles were unknitted and untangled in a slow and tactile process that became a form of embodied listening. Through acts of touching and untangling, the textiles revealed relational stories and affective traces connected to crafting processes, performances, and performer interactions.

Drawing on Karen Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’, Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘making kin,’ and K.E. Løgstrup’s ‘ethical demand,’ the essay reflects on how ethical and responsive relationships with non-human textile companions may emerge through crafting practices. The textiles are approached not as passive matter, but as active creative collaborators participating in aesthetic and relational processes.

The essay further follows the textiles into the performance RED CARPET (2024), where they are re-crafted into a knitted scenographic object and activated in collaboration with Felicita Brusoni and Valentina Sechi. Through this continuing transformation, the video essay proposes material-discursive listenings as practices of care, kinship, and shared authorship across human and non-human relations.

Keywords: textiles, material listening, material-discursive listenings, crafting, knitting, artistic research, embodied listening, non-human companions, knitted scenographic objects.

Thank you to X-act/Kitt Johnson and Felicita Brusoni & Valentin Sechi for wonderful collaborations, to Felicita Brusoni for sharing experiences with the red vulva and to Tanja Hylling Diers & Yann Coppier for engagement and feedback.

© Charlotte Østergaard 2026.