Histories are woven, knotted, and impossible to disentangle. This is especially true when working through the recent past with linked threads to the present. By what merit is something deemed cultural heritage, archivable, or not? With any judgment, the present casts its dice towards an imagined future, waging a bet on stakes unknown. In this talk, Renée Turner discusses her project, “The Warp and Weft of Memory,” an online narrative archive exploring the closet of Dutch artist Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht. Having passed away in 2013 at the age of one hundred, the traces of her figure can still be sensed through the shape of her clothes, and the range of garments illustrates her fascination with travel, textiles, and her life as an artist. Moving through Gisèle’s clothing and photographic archive, Turner reflects on the epistemology of the closet, the pitfalls of taxonomical fervour, and the complexity of entangled histories.
