Holly Chang

The Moon and Material Kin: Interview with Akash Inbakumar
C Magazine

Holly Chang: How would you describe your practice?

Akash Inbakumar: My practice primarily focuses on craft, methodology, and world-building as a way of storytelling. I focus on material kin as a way of conceiving or making an alternative form of family while queering the notion of family-making. I conceptualize my weaving as a process of sex between the loom and I. The fabric is the child we conceive through our ritual. The cloth then carries genetic information—it tells a story, carrying context from me as the maker, but also from the materials and equipment that I use. My exhibition “Era of the Moon: Phases” [Art Gallery of Burlington, 2023] investigated cyclical patterns in our life and used the moon as a metaphor for how we go through these changes.

“Era of the Moon” is a part of a much bigger story, inspired by the in-depth world-building of the video game Elden Ring. This show is one part of a three-part story, with the working title An Age of False Gods. The other parts are Era of Stars and Era of Rot; Stars is about connectivity and navigation, Moon is where we have made all these connections, and Rot is where everything falls apart, but the matter from the decay forms new stars in a cycle of creation, manifestation, and decay.

HC: Can you describe “Era of the Moon” as if someone has never seen it? As well as what you’d want a viewer to take away from the show?

AI: The exhibition had four components: in the centre, handwoven and hand-stitched garments hung on a custom-made palm wood structure, which acted as an armature to symbolize the figures of two dancers. A large cotton fabric piece, where I used lace-stitching to connect the panels, covered the ceiling and depicted a batik [an Indonesian technique of wax-resist dying] moon in the middle. The back wall featured a three-panel triptych made using shibori (a Japanese dye technique typically used with indigo dye) with the image of two batik hands holding pearls, and pearl embellishments in the stitching. Lastly, there was a video of a performance that captured two dancers in movement with the garments, who orbited each other like the relation of the moon with the earth.

I’d want the viewer to recognize the abundance of natural metaphors in the world that can console us. We can be very polarized by the world we are in and often redact it as a place to look for answers. During the pandemic, the moon was my biggest support. It was a guiding light for me at night—having that companionship helped me a lot. This was my thanks to the moon. The viewer doesn’t have to be attached to the moon, but I hope that they can go into the world and find metaphor and support through nature.

HC: I am interested in circling back to your concept of material kin—can you speak to how it comes through in the exhibition?

AI: Primarily, material kin comes through for me in the wearable pieces—how do I get the viewer to interact with the garment? Often when garments are displayed, they are very stagnant. I had an opportunity this time to work with Roya DelSol, who is my co-director for the video, and choreographer Sofi Gudiño. The choreography involved us listening to what the textile had to say. For the viewer, beyond the movement and looking at the other pieces, I think of the textiles as maps/roadmaps that can lead the way. The kinship part includes what kin can do with each other—they lead the way when you are stuck or stay with you where you are stuck. It doesn’t always have to be about moving forward. I hoped the ceiling piece would have an element of comfort from the sense of being wrapped in a textile womb, as it engulfed the viewer.

The notion of material kin is from the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway. She talks about making kin with animals and hybrid species in speculative fiction, where people are being gene-spliced, and children have three parents. I thought this was a beautiful concept especially in this time of ecological terror. I was really interested in doing the same, making kin, with material. It’s my proposition to the question of, “how do we pass on information?” This is slightly post-human. When you are wearing my garments, they act as a second skin and transform the wearer into a material kin hybrid that is more than its parts.

I don’t always view material kinship as 50/50. Maybe it’s more like 33%, 33%, 33% (plus the decimals)—between me, the material, and the equipment, where we are all agents of change and practice. In that sense, I believe in material agency when something breaks or reacts in a way that the maker wasn’t expecting. It’s up to the maker’s skillset to develop a vernacular of working with something over time, to understand the language of that entity or being.

HC: What do you think about the agency of the objects you create and its connection to craft and other craft practices/processes?

AI: How my material kin connect with deeper narratives of craft and craft-making stems from a romanticized vision of craft. An example of this is that often motifs in clothing came from the world our ancestors lived in. The paisley pattern that originally came from the Middle East and travelled to South Asia became really tied with the image of a mango because that’s what people had around, and it is similar in shape. It reminds me of when religions hybridize to form new gods and rituals. A lot of Pagan rituals were integrated into Christianity—these motifs come from another place that gets reinterpreted in context and narrative. To me, these are hybrid children of all these cross-pollinations through generations, which carry knowledge in their bodies. This is my personal perspective on why people have biological kin/children. I think there is this idea of passing down knowledge, yourself, to this new being. I think material can also do that, and objects can be made with love and feelings and be associated with conceiving. I love the double entendre of conceiving an idea and the physical idea of conceiving a child.

HC: You’re directly involved with the performance that is part of the exhibition—how did that begin, and how is your craft practice embedded in performance? Does performance have a possibility to be an extension of craft?

AI: It’s been quite the journey to get to performance and moving in my own work. I’ve always gravitated towards making wearables. In my first year at OCADU, I had made quite a few but was always too shy to perform in them. So, I would install them like artifacts: on the floor, half-buried like it was a “performative artifact.” It was me being shy, but I would wear them and strut around the studio like a diva. But to conceptually move in them the way I wanted to, I felt like I couldn’t.

For a long time, I was making wearables and not wearing them. Eventually I got really depressed in my practice and stopped making for a while. This whole time, these material kin were screaming at me, “we want to be worn, we want to be performed in.” Finally, I applied to the Plug-N-Play residency with the Toronto Dance Theatre, and was accepted.

The first day was me absorbing the humongous space. I also felt very imposter-y, like this could have gone to an actual dancer. The second day, I put on the costumes and realized how intuitive the movement was. I let the garments guide me. It was a big boost of confidence to take the jump and have that space to practice and explore the movement.

If I’m going to pivot and tell a sappy story, I feel like performance was a roadblock because of how much feedback I got from my parents about the way I moved my body. Being queer and BIPOC, I feel like it’s always a tight rope. From the way I walked to the way I use a knife in my right hand and a fork in my left hand, I felt so self-conscious about any notion of my body being perceived. And to finally let go, there is still body dysmorphia that holds me back sometimes, but I think the first step was just doing it and letting it implode.

I feel like there is the “craft of dance” and the “craft of cheese-making”; there are so many crafts. My question is “what is craft?”—which I don’t know. What I realized is there is this thing of “sampling” that has a connective tissue between traditional notions of craft and material, and the craft of moving your body. In textiles, you’re probably going to make a few samples to explore techniques. In dance, Sofi and I were getting to know each other’s bodies and leaning into each other to understand body weight and how each of us distribute our weight. I didn’t realize all these building blocks that dance can have. Repetition in dance is so familiar to me through the repetition of weaving or sample-making.

HC: For me, I can see three distinct craft processes in the exhibition—indigo and natural dying, weaving, and costume-making. Can you talk more about your processes?

AI: Shibori and batik have become two of my favourite processes. I used to be against surface design techniques. I used to buy yarns and not dye them, to focus on the weave structure. During the pandemic, I didn’t have access to my loom and I gravitated toward natural dye, which is safe to do at home. Dying using shibori and batik feels more free form, and I want to engage in processes that I like doing—I don’t want to force myself to conceive kin.

When I started draping woven wearables on my body, I was like, “oh this works!” My first instinct now with textiles isn’t to put them on the wall, but how can I play with them on my body? I wouldn’t call myself a costume maker. I think about them as wearable sculptures; I don’t mass produce anything and they are not very functional. It is more like the costume is wearing you than you are wearing the costume—if you move the wrong way, it will slip off.

HC: Do you feel like your analog processes engage with the canon and histories of craft? How does your practice expand on more traditional values?

AI: I think what draws me to more traditional practices is repetition. Even digital weaving still has a lot of repetition. But I like that analog is slow—with that time, so much communication happens between me and the material. I think the history of craft and any traditional craft practice (at least the ones that come to mind) is based in community and sharing material. I wouldn’t say my practice begins from picking raw fibre—the craft industries used to be so interconnected, where you would know where the material comes from and the person processing your yarn. And before that, you were the one processing the raw fibre, letting it dry, spinning and weaving it, and making fabric for your kin/family. There is something that I romanticize about that whole process, a kind of richness of technology.

I find that repetition is a way of investing yourself into what you are making. I often think about my mom’s Buddhist prayers; you repeat them daily, and it shows your worship and commitment to something. My first (moon) work was a lot of hand-stitching rope, and each stitch is a mantra to my thanks. My mind is in the work because of how repetitive it is. If it is in a community base, you are surrounded by people doing the same thing or working to the same goal.

HC: When you talk about community, even looking at the zine you produced for “Era of the Moon,” I see so many names included. How do you think community figures into the creation of your show, and craft more broadly?

AI: This exhibition took a village to make. In the craft perspective, I want to delve into each component of the show…

For weaving, I was taught in a formal university setting and I was weaving with a bunch of peers and had a teacher to ask. The first time we wound a warp was in a group—one person was counting the thread, the other person was talking and hopefully didn’t lose the thread count. This engraved in me that weaving can be done alone, but also as a group. Every time I weave, I’m reminded of who taught me, from the way I dress my loom to the way I know how to keep a thread in tension.

In the show specifically, even in filming—how many people are on set to bring your vision to life is astonishing to me. There’s the PA, AD, director, camera grip, lighting person, etc. On filming day, there were 15 people on set that I have never met, but they were all there to be a part of the process. As an artist, often art practices today are a “one-man show” until you are installing, then you have a team. From social media to self-promotion, documentation, making the work—to me, this is ridiculous. It takes a village to even be an artist, and with this project, I was able to obtain a Canada Council grant to pay a competitive rate to my studio assistants and everyone I worked with. To have these people to bounce my ideas off of—to know they supported my vision felt great and made the work feel fuller.

The goal of my work is to world-build; to do this alone leads to the world that we are living in today where very few people have a voice. To be a leader is about sharing and this takes so many voices and feedback. I kept telling Sofi, “Please direct in a way where we are working with the cloth, but if you want to throw something in, throw it in.” With Roya, I said, “Listen if there is a shot you see, ring it in. I trust what you see, your expertise, what you are bringing to the table.” With the fabrication team, I was asking, “What do you think of this, what does this look like?” I can be a liaison because other people have great ideas and there are things you haven’t thought of. People that we often forget are the install team—you can make work and it’s half the game; the last part is how you install it. Installs can make or break the work. I came with no install plan to the gallery and described it to the team, who brought the vision to life and worked with me to adapt and change (installers included Joseph Thomson, Rollin King, Jasmine Mander, Yahn Nemirovsky, Samuel Kwan and Miao Xuan Liu). I couldn’t have done it without all of them.

https://cmagazine.com/articles/the-moon-and-material-kin-interview-with-akash-inbakumar