The Touch and Breath of Cloth: Folding and Unfolding Bedsheets with María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Authors

Theresa Downing, University of Minnesota

Date of this Version

2024

Document Type

Presentation

Citation

Textile Society of America 2024 Symposium

Shifts & Strands: Rethinking the Possibilities and Potentials of Textiles, November 12-17, 2024, a virtual event

Comments

Published by the Textiles Society of America

Copyright 2024, the author. Used by permission

Abstract

María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Spoken Softly with Mama (1998) is an immersive installation she created to commune with her enslaved Nigerian ancestors and extended family in Cuba, when she was living in the U.S. but separated from family due to the embargo. A monumental work in the artist’s oeuvre with slave ship motifs, glass clothes irons, ironing boards, video projection, and sound, the dream-like installation transmits Campos-Pons’ thoughts like a letter written in cotton and silk. The installation centers her female family members, who worked as domestic laborers, with portraits projected or printed upon the means of their employment: bedsheets and ironing boards.

This paper explores what I argue is the material-specific core driving the installation: the repetition of folding and unfolding bedsheets. An artist with fiber sensibilities, Campos-Pons foregrounds the beauty and power of the fold—in videos of her arms folding sheets by halves or flinging them outward, like sails flapping in the wind. I inform my interpretation with the material properties of folds from textile conservation, metaphors of folds as containers for memory, and the artist’s family history, Santería practices, and related artworks.

As Campos-Pons rapidly lifts and lowers a sheet, the repeated "whap" of the fabric lulls us with sounds of its rising and collapsing against itself: its touch and breath. Her repetitive actions force the fabric into life, making it breathe and gust, rupturing our sense of time and space. In this way, Campos-Pons folds the diasporic distance and propels her thoughts across the water, home.