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# to you Dear reader, please spend some second on this little note: I’ll give you some help to orientate you through these pages. In this colour-in book you will get closer to new materialism and “material assemblages and affective atmospheres”, really important topics if you want to understand where architecture and philosophy are meeting today. Really important topics also if you want to get a more intimate view and a more sensitive understanding of what’s surrounds you every day. You will not be alone in this journey: a cotton thread will guide you into texts and books from important philosopher of our time. Cotton will picked, treated and combed to then be knitted into different stories, images, memories. Through is own fibres and is it own experience, the cotton will share with you its memories that best could show you how all those philosophical quotes has a physical parallel in its reality. By following this thread you will maybe find a shortcut through otherwise complex philosophy text and you will hopefully get a glimpse of what’s the matter. Feel free to colour in the pictures that we offer to you, and don’t forget to offer a nice colour to your guide the cotton. You will hear your self at the end say: “Cotton matters!” Good luck!
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# table of contents 1# Ballad of a cotton field pag 7 2# Secret of a cotton dress pag 9 3# STRUCTURE OF A COTTON THREAD
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4# Confession of a cotton thread pag 15 5# temptation for a cotton sheet pag 17 6# celebration OF A COTTON suit pag 19 7# parable of a cotton dress pag 21 pag 23: bibliography
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1# Ballad of a cotton field A procession of thin dark skeletons. Like high-water over the field. Something breaks. We, holding the white on our hands. Many, many hands. We, waiting to let the white flakes go, snow back to the sky. This is a cotton field. I growth a soft light fuzz around my body. I could drop this wooden cage and fly. A new plant, the end of my cruise. I could. I want to take the cotton blooms with me. Metallic hands rip away my last desire. Me that stood here before, you that were beside me You, then, far away. We, inside the metallic stomach of an human machine, We forget our names. I could rotten here, you too. We could.
I want cotton lint.
I want fabric.
We, hectare of blooming field a compact mass driven by an electric will. We are dryied and cleaned. I loose my smell. Then pushed towards stinging teeth. Wind. We loose our seeds, we loose our brains. I could feel pain I could. I want yarn.
We, twins facing each other in a whirling battlefield tangle together in a weaving dance. I will be a beautiful fabric i could be a coat, i could be a wedding dress, i could. I want a t-shirt.
Combed, i´m loosing structure the limit between me and you is combed away. Then wrapped together, mechanic hugs. So long i feel, so strange. I am a thread i could be another thread. I could roll up my long body and wait. I could.
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2# SECRETS OF A COTTON DRESS Sunny morning. She just waked up. She needs to hurry up. Run to school. Naked, standing on front of the wardrobe, she decide to grab something to wear. I’m lying inside here, with other clothes. It smells like body, like Jane body, and other bodies that we met when we were out last time. A scent of soap, white and sparkling. Knife-smell. Memories from my last wash. Above me, a woolen sweater. It starts to mark its zone, spreading over my surface its yellow clumps. I’m waiting.
She looks at the pile of cloths. She spots a blue patterned cotton dress, just under her big yellow sweater. She drags it out from the pile and wears it. I stretch a sleeve out to catch her attention. I let her take me from my neck, as I taught her to do. After fighting for a second with her head, I slide around her breast, fell down over her stomach. I have to anchor my weight on her shoulder, and then Let myself explode on a fountain of color until a couple of decimeter under her waist. Every time I cover your body, Jane, You look like a fish.
Last look at the mirror. She made a good choice, something of submarine on it that makes her thinking about diving. She slam the door, run to the station and jump into the subway. The heavy, chocolate/piss tasting air of the subway make me tighten my fiber. Make me come closer to Jane skin. Some sweat under her armpits moistens part of my web, her smell soak deep into my stitching. Here, where me and the human liquid meet, I grove dark. Standing in the middle of the crowd, holding strong the handrail to not fall dawn, she looks at the people around her. Nobody seams to notice her. Nobody notice Anybody. Normality.
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I come closer to her skin. Her second dress. We face each other, our patterns like in a blurred mirror. I wonder if sometimes she takes that dress off, as she use to do with me. Her fabric, skin, feels so fragile when I lean over it. I can feel something moving under there. I get warm and crepitate at every beat. I want to make a hole through the skin, I want to see what’s under. Something on her skin is hitching. The dress is vibrating when she tries to scratch the bother away. The dress is vibrating. I bite her. The knots of my weaving eat some scales of her skin.
Our two textures try to burst into each other patter. She scrabbles under her dress. She scratches her skin over her hips. She screams. I feel another piece of her skin, belonging to her right hand attacking me from outside. Some of my threads are hurt by her nail. Dark blue nail polish on my maimed thread. I bite. She screams. In the train, everyone rise up his head. Their eyes on Jane. Someone starts to speak with her.
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3# STRUCTURE OF A COTTON THREAD Molecular stratum 1: Cotton threads. Molar stratum 1: Cotton threads knitted with each other into a mash. Materiality of stratum 1: cottonv. Expressivity of a stratum 1: knitting.
Molecular stratum 4: A group of persons. Molar stratum 3: A nation Materiality of a stratum 3: persons. Expressivity of a stratum 3: generalising.
Molecular stratum 2: Knitted fabric. Molecular stratum 2: Knitted fabric sawn together to form a dress. Materiality of a stratum 2: fabric. Expressivity of a stratum 1: sawing. Molecular stratum 3: A person wearing a dress Molar stratum 3: A group of dressed persons. Materiality of a stratum 3: dress. Expressivity of a stratum 3: collecting.
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4# Confession of a cotton thread He pierces me. He passes through me. Now he is I. Then is out. He is again. I’m elsewhere. This is what you’re made for, I read. The needles that penetrate your fiber, this will give you a body. (He deprives you from your body. Your individuality is knitted away.) Knitting is an ancient technique based on fundamental rules and settings, someone say. Node number one, first norm, node number two, second norm, node number three, third norm, node number four … (Four nodes ago, you have been deleted.)
He has the power to make something out of you. To make you matter, I read. (You will be violated into a form) Do you never wish to perforate I’m, manipulate him into a shape. Do you never wish to turn into metal, to never be scared of became cotton again? He pierces me. Then I’m fabric. I’m elsewhere.
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5# temptation for a cotton sheet He enters the living room for the first time. A pile of clean sheet sits in a fragile tower on top of the table. Smell of cleaning product, flowers. The skin of his faces relaxes, the ending of his mouth shake for an instant before to extend far from each other, and fast come back to their first position. His hand move towards the pile, without really detaching itself from the side of his body. His tongue get wet, pushes on the arch of his mouth. His lips dangerously separate from each other, letting some air go out. With a little sound.
The risk to be caught, the urgency to plan how to make the stain disappear, that might and with the deed of turning the tower upside down. Feeling of being too grownup for this. Temptation, for a very small instant. Shame. Pride.
Feeling of being home, in his parents’ old place. Feeling of bending toward the pile and sucking a hem of a sheet, so to get out that perfume, flowers, on his mouth.
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6# celebration OF A COTTON suit Black fabric. Cotton. Cotton weaved in rigorous small pattern, every twist identical to the others, uniformly stitched together in a smooth sleek cloth. Fabric that is tailored with strong perfect seams into jackets and pants. Black proportioned tailored cloth that slightly shine reflecting the light. Light bulb, each of them delicately hanging from the ceiling. Many light bulbs wrapped together in heavy bouquets. Light that just bounces fast between sleek cloth and pale translucent faces. Faces that old serious their seams together.
Face smiling in a glowing gloom. Smiles that test the elasticity of their fabric. Skin. Skin protected by weaved cotton, skin that furtively escape the cloth to complete with its movement some important word. Word that sounds important. Discourses weaved with precision and mastery into the room. Sounds that cover the word for the one that are not close.
Spheric feeling of homogeneous perfection. Swallowing sensation of perfectly weaved fabric around her body. Mouth full of black wool. Laughing swallowing decreasing air. Someone enter the room. Pungent feeling of a thread that brakes. Punctiform spheric collision. Light burning compound. Is there any hole in a black fabric?
A laugh brakes into silence. The crystal light vibrate, shadows on black fabric. She enters the room.
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7# parable of a cotton dress It was a Tuesday morning when we read in the newspaper that we had to bring our cloth to dye. Everyone in the village and in a ray of 10 kilometres had to do the same. As a preventive treatment, so they wrote. Apparently some dangerous exotic bacillus fell down from an airplane and deposited above our land, as much exotic for us that established here recently. “Alterixenus Bacillus finds grip just on textiles of any kind, resides in their woven pattern and from there attacks the skin causing hives that brings people to madness.” That’s why we packed all our clothes and drove to a big factory north of where we use to live. We had to stand in a line, everyone holding big bags full of pants and shirts, before to enter and receive “the treatment”.
We had to undress and wear plastic coat, like hospital one: everything we had had to pass through this care. First and essential for the success of the project: every cloth is dipped in big vats full of a substance similar to mordant. After this process the cloth will be treated with a special anti-bacillus serum.
Everyone who’s cloth as been dipped into that substance kept together and formed a city, and every rule that came, from politicians or from the folk, was received by everyone with the same enthusiasm, and every danger that came, from the land or from the sky, was feared by everyone with the same strength.
This first step is so important since, due to it, the next substance where the fabric is dipped in would be hardly fastened on the material and would never be washed away by any detergent or solvent. The curative serum will always protect the fibres and keep our bodies safe from exotic sickness, that’s what they explained to us.
A new atmosphere surrounds on our land.
What they didn’t tell to us was how our life would have changed afterwards.
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# bibliography 1# Katie Lloyd Thomas ed.
‘Introduction’, Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice, London: Routledge, 2007.
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialism’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.
2# Jane Bennett, ‘Preface’; and
‘The Agency of Assemblages’, in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.
3# Manuel DeLanda, ‘Deleuze,
Materialism and Politics ’, in Ian Buchanan and N. Thoburn, eds, Deleuze and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
4# Judith Butler, ‘Bodies that
Matter’, in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London: Routledge, 1993.
5# Nigel Thrift, ‘Spatialities of Feeling’ in NonRepresentational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge, 2008.
Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, in Melissa Gregg, ed. ‘Affect.’ M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). 25 Nov. 2011. http://journal. media-culture.org.au/0512/03shouse.php
6# Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Atmo-
spheres of Democracy’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005. Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Gas Warfare–or: The Atmoterrorist Model, in Terror From the Air, LA: Semiotext(e), 2009.
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