Museum as weaving device
Weaving became more than a method for me—it became a way to inhabit ethnography differently, a way to loosen the taut threads woven tightly into museum stories, to invite the knots and tangles into view. 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?
I came to think of museums as looms—devices that stretch threads, that twist collections into patterns of knowledge, and knot them into stories. Museums are not still or neutral; they knot together objects, people, histories, and more-than-human worlds into fragile and shifting arrangements. The craft of museum practice is inseparable from what these places hold—and haunted by the history of how they came to hold it. The textures they weave—from violence, erasure, safeguarding, and care—are embedded not only in the collections but also in the institutions themselves. They hold histories that refuse to be undone.
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, moving through ever-changing patterns. 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.
Research, then, is not a linear tracing but a shared exploration of relationality: slow, tactile, and inherently fraught. Patterns form and shift through critical knowledge, embodied attention, and care. This demands an improvisational openness - an approach as eventful as threads themselves, as histories that refuse to settle.
Museums, understood as weaving devices, must resist closure. The histories sedimented in their collections are still unfolding, still becoming. 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/