TEXTile Manifestoes Book Launch

Fashion
Literature
Humanities

Wed 27 Sep 2023 07:00 PM Bohemian National Hall Ballroom

TEXTile Manifestoes. Photo credit © Filip Kartousek

How to think, write and emit a manifesto in the 21st century? How can the urgent need for manifestoes in our contemporary predicament be recovered? Discredited in the catastrophic peripeties of modernity, is it even possible to issue a manifesto? Could ‘textilizing’ the genre, rendering the manifesto a textile, be a possibility? These and other questions are assembled and interwoven in TEXTile Manifestoes into broader political, sociological, philosophical, art history and historical frameworks thereby establishing a wide range of new textural interconnections.

The Czech Center New York launches the TEXTile Manifestoes anthology and hosts its editors and co-authors Pavel Liška and Robin R. Mudry.

The evening will begin with keynote remarks by Avital Ronell (NYU) and will be framed with a fashion performance by Dusan Tynek Theatre Company, as well as with remarks by Liběna Rochová (UMPRUM, Prague), I. A. Roland-Rodríguez and Paris Lavidis (The European Graduate School).

The door opens at 7:00 PM with a welcome drink and the event commences at 7:30 PM Eastern Time.

Free registration here.

Copies of TEXTile Manifestoes will be available for purchase following the event.

TEXTile Manifestoes, Pavel Liška & Robin R. Mudry (Eds.)

The interdisciplinary and international anthology was initiated by Pavel Liška and Robin R. Mudry and was published by the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM) in 2022.

It departs from the genre-related ambivalence of the manifesto as a modern male form of authoritatively demanding radically different futures and instead, uses the manifesto to connect with the triadic complex of TEXT — TEXTile — TEXTure in order to reflect, refashion and redefine this means of expression in new creative, critical, deconstructive and decolonial models. Underlining the structural and metaphorical contiguity of texts and textiles, TEXTile Manifestoes rethinks the political and the ethical in a world desperately seeking the certainties and clear programs of modern manifestoes without returning to the worst forms of historical totality.

TEXTile Manifestoes originally emerged out of a cross-disciplinary collaboration between several studios at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and was begun by Liběna Rochová. Students from the Studios of Fashion and Footwear Design, Graphic Design, Visual Communication and Type Design as well as Photography II worked together to weave their textiles and discourses in order to design and to produce their manifestoes by combining fashion collections with burning contemporary issues of mass surveillance, artificial intelligence or virtual reality, but also to more private struggles of identity, memory and (mental) health. The creations from four of these collections (Vojtěch Bašta, Alexandra Gnidiaková, Tomáš Němec and Valérie Jurčíková) will be presented during the book launch.

The students’ art was later complemented by and (re)contextualized with international contributions ranging from ancient Andean textile studies to neuro-psychoanalysis, from literary and art criticism to aesthetics and musicology.

Texts written by the following authors are included: Kyle Allan, Jayson Althofer, Erik Annerborn, Luciana Benetti Marques Valio, Shelley Burian, Subhradeep Chatterjee, Ingrid Cogne, Arthur Crucq, Evelyn Echle, Pasquale Fameli, Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová, Paris Lavidis, Elisabeth Längle, Pavel Liška, Veronica Montanino, Robin R. Mudry, Pierluca Nardoni, Anna Maria Panzera, Anika Reineke, I. A. Roland-Rodríguez and Anne Röhl.

More about the book here.

Pavel Liška is an interdisciplinary curator at the Museum of Art and Design Benešov (Prague). He focuses on Central European art and design of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Robin R. Mudry is a researcher, thinker, curator and activist. He studies at the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought of The European Graduate School and at the Institute of Art History at the University of Leipzig.

Liběna Rochová is Professor Emeritus and former Head of the Studio of Fashion and Footwear Design at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM). She is a leading Czech fashion designer and founder of Studio LR.

I. A. Roland-Rodríguez is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at The European Graduate School under Catherine Malabou as well as a researcher of the somatic markers of emotion at the Affective Neuroscience Lab (LaNA) of the Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD) in Santiago de Chile.

Avital Ronell is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and English at New York University, as well as the Jacques Derrida Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague (UMPRUM), Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA), Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington and Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York.

The book launch is organized under the auspices of H. E. Mr Miloslav Stašek, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United States.

Partners of the event