Museum as weaving device
Anni Albers, the textile artist and thinker, did not see a thread as a line to be simply traced—as provenance research sometimes imagines it—but as an event, a becoming, a relationship in motion. What if we reimagined research with museum collections as a gathering of these eventful knots? Not linear paths leading back in time, or outward to so-called “source communities,” but as entanglements within a broader, textured weave where objects, people, histories, and more-than-human worlds are tangled together?
I have come to think of museums as weaving devices, as looms of a kind, that stretch threads, twist collections into patterns of knowledge, and knot them into stories. Museums are never still or neutral in how they weave knowledge but they knot together objects, people, histories, and more-than-human worlds into fragile, shifting arrangements. The craft of museum practice is inseparable from what these places hold and haunted by how they came to hold it. The textures they produce, of violence, erasure, safeguarding, and care, are embedded not only in the collections but in the institutions themselves, in bureaucratic rituals, institutional habits, and the everyday craft of curation.
Seeing museums as weaving devices invites us to rethink how we approach collections. It asks us to dwell with the knot, where tangled, dense, and complex textures become our focus. The knot resists resolution and insists we engage with its texture, its weight, its layered contradictions. To begin with the knot is to confront the tangled pasts museums inherit and perpetuate. Like a weaver handling delicate threads, researchers must navigate fragile, shifting relationships, and being willing to improvise as patterns form and change. To weave is to keep shaping and reshaping, listening closely to stories told by frayed edges and loose ends. It is to recognize museums as agents of power and aesthetics, where bureaucratic rituals, institutional habits, and the craft of curation and care shape both what becomes known and how it is woven into relations.
Museums, understood as weaving devices, must resist closure. The histories sedimented in their collections are still unfolding. In this political conjuncture, my hope is that these fragile threads remain open—to repair, to futures not yet written, to possibilities still waiting to be imagined, to be prefigured, to be woven anew.
To learn more about the idea of museum as weaving device, check out my blog post - On Threads and Knots: Reweaving Critical Heritage Studies - published with Currents in Critical Heritage Studies: https://achsrevamp.squarespace.com/currents-critical-heritage/2024/11/27/on-threads-and-knots-reweaving-critical-heritage-studies
An expanded theoretical version can be found here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/weaving-europe-crafting-the-museum-9781350226777/