Okay, hi. Good. Microphone. First time ever microphone. Hi, welcome.
This is not at all panic-inducing. I'm very happy to see you all.
I'm extremely glad to see so many people crafting here. It calms me down a lot.
I hope it helps you too.
And now we're going for quitea wild ride through history with all
the good reasons why we should craft and why it helps, especially now.
I think I started the whole thing with this beautiful sampler, which I didn't do.
Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning.
And I guess this is where we all come together.
And I'd say from the Bayeux tapestry to the clothing we wear, textiles always carry meaning.
And working with textile mediums like yarn, thread,
and floss is generally seen as something feminine.
A hobby that is usually classified as a craft, not an art.
And that's something that people do in their free time
to unwind, probably the more boring kind of people.
And most of us still have grown up with the image of
grandmothers lovingly knitting socks or something for the family.
An act of care that was never really cherished much.
And I'd say the ability to produce clothing by yourself is quite a superpower.
And some people around here know that by experience.
The same goes for altering or repairing your clothing.
The thing is, the patriarchal society's tendency to underestimate anything considered
feminine and indestructibly linked to that domestic, is an ongoing struggle.
But being underestimated provides a cover and with
it the opportunity for subversion and resistance.
Hardly anyone has ever considered a friendly knitting grandma
like that to be a very serious information gathering hub.
I mean, yes, gossip of course, but this can also expand to gathering information
on troop strength, their movements, the locations of their bases, something
that hasn't yet occurred to armies at war, but it did to the resistance.
During the American War for Independence, for example,
Molly Old Mom Rinker, as she was called, an innkeeper in
Philadelphia, was one of the spies for George Washington.
And she used knitting as a cover to spy on the other troops.
And the most beautiful thing about it is that she
didn't knit, she just pretended to, she was sat there.
But old lady knitting must be, must be cute, must be harmless.
And she then wrote down the information on the troops, put the scraps
of paper into the balls of yarn and then tossed them off a cliff behind
her where her side then gathered them up to have the information.
So the image alone is enough.
During both world wars, the Belgian resistance relied heavily on information
provided by old ladies knitting who lived close to train stations or train tracks.
They sat there at the window in front of the house knitting,
maybe really knitting, watching the trains, watching the troop
movements, and then knitting the information into their pieces.
And I haven't found out which kind of stitch was which kind of information yet.
But they then gave those pieces of shawl, sock, whatever, to someone else who
can then read out of the knitting the movements of the train and the troops.
And this is quite unsuspicious.
I mean, an old lady giving someone a pair of socks, what could be more harmless?
Giving people paper during war, now that might raise an eyebrow.
And the thing is, knitting has always been a civilian war effort.
Especially women were held up to knit socks and scarves and whatever for the soldiers.
So during, especially during wartime, people have been seen knitting anywhere.
Which is the most gorgeous cover for resistance and spying I can think of.
And this is something that has been largely overlooked by historians so far.
And this long-standing tradition can be traced back into the
18th century, at least in the American Revolutionary War.
A revolution that started by protesting against tariffs, just saying.
Anyways, knitting.
I haven't found any pictures of any coded messages in knitting, historical ones, yet.
But knitting is a technique that lends itself quite easily to hiding information.
Because it consists mainly of so-called knit stitches and purl stitches.
For those of us, of you, who aren't that familiar with
it, the v-shaped ones are the knits, which are the...
Well, if you can look very closely, they are also v-shaped in the knit fabric.
And the dashes are the pearls, which are the bumps.
And basically, it's a binary system.
And thus, it can beautifully hold binary programming language and binary code.
It also works for morse code, where one stitch is a dot and three stitches are a dash.
There are also systems of knotting yarn to signify mouse code or hide numbers in them.
The duodecimal system is something that can be easily translated into knitting as well.
This can be considered a very low-tech form of steganography,
a technique for hiding information in plain sight, that
several of you will know from other funny ways to play with it.
And there are a couple of projects around about
translating information into knitting patterns.
One of them is at Georgia Tech University, where Dr. Elisabetta
Matsumoto is exploring yarn as a programmable material, and
where she researches knit as a code, because there's a very close
connection between the logic behind coding and behind knitting.
So, there are trials going on that people learn to knit while they learn
to code, because somehow it goes hand in hand and helps people learn.
So, if you already know how to code, knitting shouldn't be that hard for you.
If you know how to knit, maybe try coding.
Using knitting as a coded message even made it into literature.
Charles Dickens' novel "A Tale of Two Cities", has a figure
in it, Madame Defarge, a French woman who has described
knitting in France while the guillotine is beheading nobles.
And she is sitting there knitting while watching the executions and
is documenting the names of the people being executed in her knitting.
Do with that what you will.
Now, if you don't know how to knit and you're presented
with a jumper or something, you wouldn't see anything in it.
You wouldn't see any information in it.
And the thing is that knitting patterns in itself look so much like a cipher that
printing them was actually forbidden in the US and the UK during both world wars.
So, just to give you an example, this is a very bad photo
of an actual knitting pattern of a skirt with a lace border.
Obviously, for me.
And I think it makes it quite clear why people could think
this is code and a kind of cipher or complete nonsense.
And while the Brits actually banned the printing of patterns like that in
fear of ciphers being hidden in them, they employed so-called knitting spies.
And I can't tell you how thrilled I am that this is a proper term.
And sometimes it actually was enough that people who presented
female had a bag with them that was a properly stashed knitting bag.
There's the story of the American agent Elizabeth Bentley, who smuggled
microfilms and memos and coded documents with early plans for the B-29
bombs and aircraft manufacturing secrets from the US to Soviet agents
in a basket fu^ll of balls of wool, needles, patterns and fabric.
Because what harm could there be?
She was later named the Red Spy Queen, but she herself quipped
that she should have rather been called the communist June Cleaver,
referring to a 1950s housewife character on American television.
Because she proved that the patriarchy's very restricted
view of women can be easily used against them.
The most famous of all the knitting spies is Phyllis Ada Latour Doyle, known as Pippa.
She was a member of the British F section of the Special
Operations Executives, who organized the resistance in France.
And she worked in France undercover for quite some time before starting
a new assignment under the codename Paulette, where she parachuted
into Normandy in 1944, to be a wireless operator in a spy network.
Her job was to cycle around and try to sell soap to German soldiers,
trying to chat with them and trying to find out about where their bases
are, how many they were, where they were going, what their plans were.
And then she went and knitted them all, the whole information into
a code, to then later give that to the transmitting and broadcast
it to her contacts in London, which she did every day, 135 times.
And the thing is, transmitting those messages via radio during that time took 30 minutes.
The Germans needed 90 to locate where the signal was coming from.
She was quite a quick person.
And it's said that she fled into the woods quite a lot and stayed alive by
foraging, which is an intersection people would likely want to look into.
And the thing is, she was put onto that assignment because she was a young pretty girl.
And her bosses said, well, this is less suspicious than the people we had
before, because everyone on that job before her was caught and executed.
And she was arrested twice, but she managed to
make them believe her cover story and she survived.
And she stayed there from May to August 1944 until they got her back out.
And she held that all as a secret, even in front of her family, for ages.
It actually came out in the early 2000s.
And then she started talking about her story.
And I brought you a very, very long quote, which I'll put up and read also.
Sorry for the translators. But it's just mind boggling.
So she was arrested and searched.
And she says, "I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk.
I had about 2000 I could use.
When I used a code, I would just pinprick it to indicate it had gone.
I wrapped the piece of silk around the knitting needle and
put it in a flat shoelace, which I used to tie my hair up.
I can remember being taken to the station, and a female soldier
made us take our clothes off to see if we were hiding anything.
She was looking suspiciously at my hair.
So I just pulled my lace off and shook my head. That seemed to satisfy her.
I tied my hair back up with the lace. It was a nerve-wracking moment."
And I can tell you, I haven't looked at scrunchies
with quite that much of interest ever since. *laughter*
For those of you with less or no hair, scrunchies are a very voluminous kind of hair tie.
Lots of hollow space to put things on textiles.
And the thing is, putting information into textiles has one other big advantage.
It can make information accessible to people who cannot read or write.
So it's not surprising that textile crafts have been used by marginalized and
disenfranchised people to protest, to organize, and to persist for centuries.
One famous example for this are the cults of the American Underground Railroad.
So just a quick context for those who aren't into history that much.
The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses,
organized to help enslaved people escape to the abolitionist North of
America, Canada, and some other countries from around about the 1780s.
The first literal underground started in 1863.
Two of the most famous organizers of that railroad
are Harriet Tubman and William Still, pictured there.
And there are stories that there were quilts designed and
sewn with coded messages to provide help along the way.
Now these stories are highly controversial, I admit,
because apparently they stem from one single source
and one publication from 1999. And there seems to be
no hard evidence for the quilts being used that way.
But, and this is an all-caps "BUT",
hard historical evidence is a sign of privilege and Western thinking.
Not all cultures document their traditions and practices in written form.
There's a thing called oral history and it's only slowly
being accepted in historical research around here.
Furthermore, people enslaved by what is now known as the
USA were forbidden from learning how to read and write.
Dismissing their stories in history due to the
lack of written documents just makes no sense.
So, by the way, when I say called this, I'm not
used to the presentation being on the other side.
But this is what we're speaking of.
And the book "Hidden in Plain View, A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad",
is based on the family history of Ozella McDaniel Williams from South Carolina,
who comes from a family of enslaved people.
And it was her grandmother's story that she told the publishers.
And for those wondering, I have a complete list of links and literature later in the talk.
And they're all already uploaded. So, the thing with the quilts.
Different squares carry different meaning.
And whenever you wanted to signify something, you
hung the quilt out of your window or over your fence
with that certain square showing, as much is the story.
And the thing is, the Underground Railroad was strictly word of mouth.
That's a safety reason. And it's also for people who couldn't read or write.
So, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the whole story of those quilts as helpers
on those escape routes were also only word of mouth.
And the thing is, even if it wasn't so, nowadays... Wait, ah, I forgot.
There's the code.
Nowadays, African-American people make those quilts
to reclaim a piece of heritage taken from them.
So, even if it's just a story, even if it's not a fact, it is the truth now.
And I nearly got sidetracked by the whole textiles
and crafts as signifiers of cultures and tradition
threatened by Western society.
And how keeping those textile traditions alive is an act of resistance in itself.
But that would go way too far right now.
Let me just share a quite elemental quote in all this.
"To create is to resist, and to resist is to create.!
And Stéphane Hessel, who I'm quoting here, was a
French diplomat, a member of the French resistance
against the Nazis in World War II and also a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp.
In 2010, aged 93, he published a pamphlet with
the title "Indignez-Vous" or "Time for Outrage!",
where he motivated young, especially young people to
stand up against injustices and to fight against it.
And it's been translated into over 20 languages
and sparked several movements all around the world.
For example, the Spanish indignados.
But right now I've been talking about stitches and about resistance.
What is the "persist" part in it all?
Well, there has been a lot of research about how crafting is beneficial to your health,
especially your mental health. And that has several reasons.
There's the one thing, knitting, crocheting, all of that.
There's a repetitive action that you do again and again and again.
And it's been measured. It induces a relaxed state, a kind of flow state.
And you can see and measure that people's breath slows down, that their pulse goes down.
It actually takes down blood pressure and it lowers cortisol levels in your blood.
So what's not to love about that?
And fun fact, in the end, you have something pretty to keep or to gift
or to keep you warm or something.
And this combination of producing something tangible, something lovely
and having a stress relief for yourself.
Well, I think you can all understand why I do about 20 crafts.
Also, it's been used in therapies for people to stop smoking or to lose weight or something,
because it keeps your hands busy.
And I think it's just the most gorgeous kind of fidget spinner
for those of us with a certain kind of brain.
It also helps with pain management, because your
brain can't concentrate on too many things at one
time. And when you're going one, two, three, left needle,
right needle, it forgets that your back has been killing you.
And I need to speed up a bit.
One of the most amazing examples I found about
the self-efficacy of crafting and how it can help
keep you sane while being resisting, is the story of Major Alexis Castagli.
He was a British soldier in the Second World War.
And he was captivated by the Germans and spent years in prisoner of war camps.
And he was taught by another prisoner how to cross stitch.
And he produced quite a lot of stitches. This is a style called sampler.
So very simple, his name, when it was done, where he was.
But the fun thing about it is, when you look at
it, there's this border that looks a bit irregular.
I know a few people of you can read it.
It is Morse code and it says "Fuck Hitler" and "God save the king".
And it was actually displayed in all four camps he was in,
because no one realized what it was saying. So, just putting that out there.
One of the good things about it, crafting also keeps your brain agile.
Things like very low stage Alzheimer's and all kind of
issues that come with advanced age can be actually, if not at all prevented, but slowed down
and lessened by doing crafty stuff, especially if you do it with other people.
Because being social helps. As much as it pains me to say that.
But the thing is, crafting circles, people.
And shout out to the Haecksen for yesterday, it was lovely.
Crafting circles is where you can go and be social,
but you don't have to look at people because you need to look at your project.
And you don't have to talk to people because there's a pattern and you have to count.
So you can be sociable while not looking at people and not talking.
And I see you understand what I mean. *applause*
One more prisoner of war resistance story I loved.
Women were forced to knit socks for the troops of the enemy who captured them.
And they decided to knit the heel a bit more narrow than it's used to,
which gave them blisters. *laughter and applause*
It does sound like a pity revenge, but let me tell you,
during times when marching was the way those troops moved,
that actually hindered the whole war effort. So kudos.
And the thing is, whenever people say nowadays, and I hear it quite often,
yes, yes, I'm a crafter, but I'm not doing grandma's knitting.
Don't diss your grandmothers like that.
What they did with the resources they had was amazing. *applause*
And I've pointed out a couple of times in that talk that
those grandma hobbies could have proven to be extra badass
because they helped resist a couple of times all over history.
And I guess a thousand histories more that we just don't know about here.
And it actually leads over to what's now called craftivism,
a term that Betsy Greer started a couple of years back.
On the one side, you have the aid side of the whole thing.
So in early COVID times, you had people gathering to
sew masks, to sew little holder things, so that medical personnel wouldn't lose their ears.
All of that. But on the other side, history is annoying.
But look, look, people, that's right.
That's also aid because there was an oil spill and
the jumpers soaked up the oil from the feathers.
So people all over the world banded together to knit and send in little jumpers.
And they do it for all kinds of animal rescue.
One thing, oh goodness, I'm usually quicker in talking.
Old style resistance and political marches, suffragettes.
There was no way they could have bought the sashes. They made them.
All of what we now buy as merch, used to be homemade, self-made.
People sat together and decided which colors they wanted.
And I don't know if it's the colors green, white and purple for give women vote.
Green, white, violet. Or if it's the symbols the color stood for.
Either way, someone decided, someone made those, including that big banner at the end.
And we still see that at demonstrations. People make their banners.
People gather behind something someone made with their own hands, often collectively.
And we keep forgetting that, that we have the power to do things together to stand up.
And I'm just going to quick march my, I don't know,
three minutes to some of the biggest movements we had.
Well, I'd say on the internet so far, because
the internet is where we all connect right now.
But we had the Pussyhat Project, which was a result of things
being said that I'm not deeming to ever, ever say myself.
But the 2017 marches had the amazing image of crowds of people with pink hats.
And when you have pictures from above, it's just, it's a unifying color in that moment.
And you have that in protest culture that people gather under one specific color.
We all know the red and black flags. But you have the pink hats.
And I'm sorry, I'm going to skip her.
And you have other pink things, because pink is a color that's deemed feminine.
And feminine is soft and doesn't really work for resistance.
And people have been criticized that their
resistance using pink and textiles is too feminine.
And can thus not be taken seriously. What the fuck?
What they did as a reaction is putting that feminine,
that domestic, that pink stuff in public spaces.
And in huge ways like these, the Solange project is
a German artist who puts these huge cross stitches
with sayings on walls. And they all have the same structure.
As long as something something, I am a feminist or I
will be a feminist and people can send in their own.
And they've done that in 28 countries so far.
And I'm very unelegantly going to skip stuff because I ran out of time.
One of my favorites, yarn bombing, used to be quite
popular here, has gone down in popularity for some
reason. I don't know. It's still very much up and alive in London and in the US.
It's also a way to take space in the public with
something that is considered soft and craft, not an art.
And that discussion needs to get restarted in another space as well.
And one of my favorites. It's okay.
For those who maybe can't read it, the person
depicted as a male says " not ALL men!" and the woman
wearing a very pretty dress and holding a chainsaw says
"Yeah? well, not all chainsaws, but here we are."
I actually had a shitstorm due to that post when I posted that.
And I very gladly had the men around me rally up and defend the whole sentiment.
And I'm very glad for the people I have around me. The links, I promised.
The upper ones are the ones I mentioned.
The lower ones are places you can go to find help, communities, patterns, often for free.
I did upload all the slides so you don't need to write or whatever.
But this is, this is a rallying cry because I've seen crafting all around this space and
all around the Congress center, meet up, sit together, make yourself a little bubble of
calm in all this very lovely but very overwhelming space.
Share your skills, teach others, hold together and keep resisting. Thank you.
*applause and cheers*
Herald: Thank you so much for this really lovely talk, I sat there,
my fingers were itching because I did not bring my knitting.
I think I'm not the only one. We are taking questions.
You can also submit them on matrix or on IRC.
And our signal angel here in the back will be picking them up. Any questions?
I don't see any on the microphones right now. Anything from the signal angel?
Nope. Nothing from the signal angel.
If you have questions, go to one of the microphones. All right.
We have a question running on microphone number one.
Hello, your support girl. Hi.
I was just going to make an addition because you talked about the underground railroad and
other marginalized communities.
There is on the African continent, for everybody
who wants to look it up, a lot of crafts that are
currently dying because people aren't doing them anymore.
But they are so important to keeping our heritage,
our identity, in the resistance of colonialism.
And sometimes, for example, fabrics that we use today to empower us, such as Ankara fabrics,
the beautiful colorful patterns that you see everywhere
when you think about Western African identity,
these came to the continent because colonialists brought them to us.
And we used them and we made them to be our identity.
So, there is transformation in resistance.
So, there is one example for everybody who wants to look it up and wants to have a look
into other marginalized communities that you didn't mention yet.
But thank you so much for your talk. That was really, really nice.
Philo: Thank you.
Herald: We have also someone standing at the microphone, which should be number two.
I can't see it.
Lower that. Hi. Also, thank you for the talk.
When we look at historical textiles and how people have been resisting with textiles,
how do you account for the survivorship or lack of survivorship of the textiles?
Because natural fibers degrade sometimes quite fast.
Several reasons. Textile history is complicated.
Which is why I took the family story of the quilts.
They don't have the quilt anymore. They couldn't take them with them.
They are probably cotton. They're probably gone now or reused for scraps.
But we have stories and we need to look more into family stories about the things
that grandmothers told their kids and then told their kids to find traces.
Because you do find traces every now and then.
And every once in a while someone opens a box and
you find scraps and it's just like, I don't know.
I don't want to say anything religious.
It's just magical when that happens and we finally have something to hold on to.
There are a couple of people on the YouTubes who do wonderful costume history stuff.
Bernadette Banner being one of the most gorgeous ones. Look into that.
They know more. Look at the literature I edit. There might be hints.
But this is something I do for fun to not die in history.
Because my day to day job is doing Nazi time research and it's not healthy.
So, do go out explore.
Thank you. Microphone three please.
Question: Hello.
You mentioned a couple of times that knitting is considered a craft and not an art.
What's the difference between the two according
to you and do you think knitting should be an art?
Philo: I'd consider it an art but it is usually considered
a craft in so far that it's something useful,
not just for beauty's sake or political messaging which I think is too too close-minded.
And I would say we need to reconsider textile
works as artworks that have been traditionally done
by women that have until now not been considered enough
in what they do and what they say and what they transport.
Question: Thank you.
Herald: Microphone number one please.
Question: Not a question exactly but two recommendations.
If you need a new hobby and you like textile arts, try spinning it's very fun. *laughter*
Other thing, there's an artist, a current artist, an active artist who is weaving
quilts not with secret messages but with political statements and messages.
Her name is Tabitha Arnold or Tabitha Arnold. I actually
don't know if it's German or American or whatever.
I just know her website honestly. It's great. You can look into it.
I don't know if you want to add great artists to
your list or whatever but that's the recommendation
for everyone of current artists doing things like these not just historical things.
Philo: Yes thank you very much for that. I mean quilts
are something very interesting. There's also the
story or the history of the AIDS quilts where people in communities were sewing their own
memorial pieces that were then after they died sewn
into a huge quilt and that then hung off buildings
as a sign of remembrance but also a sign of protest during the height of the AIDS crisis.
So, textiles have been used by lots of people
historically and now to memorize things, to protest
things, to further things and I'm always happy to learn more because this is not a closed
off thing. This is a quick look into the chaos of my mind and where I try to find calm.
Herald: Microphone one.
Question: Yes, thank you very much for the talk and I was also very delighted to see already
yesterday so many knitters and crocheters around
the congress. As far as I learned is like from this
year on like the whole knitting crocheting hobby or
whatever you want to call it, is skyrocketing over
different societies. I think not just not just Germany
but also in the US. And do you have any insight on
why it is like historical or why is it that we
have this revival of this hobby or crafting or art
movement at the moment, this year?
Philo: Yeah, well the thing is, people have been saying "oh there's a revival
of knitting" for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years now
which is okay because it's something people usually do
in their own four walls. I do sit around knitting
or crafting publicly a lot, especially in meetings,
do that in meetings, it makes them so much better.
But Covid made a change. Covid is where especially
crafting communities banded together online and
they shared patterns and they shared things to do.
Not only the the masks and how to put little bands
in the at the back to to not kill your ears, but the
we are going to meet up and everybody is going to
stitch the next piece of this and that and to have
something to do while around you the world is falling
apart as you know it and I think we're still in
that spiral in a way and it does give you that
little piece of self-efficacy. This is something
I can do. I mean same goes for gardening or baking or
whatever. This calming down of "the world is burning,
but look I made a bread for us for dinner". It's
something very powerful and yes I know the politics
are heading in a direction I think no one of us
wants them to go and "I don't know what to do
right now, but it's cold outside, I made your scarf",
are little moments of community care that we can do
where we can prove to ourselves we might not be able
to change the big picture right now but we can take
care of us and our loved ones around us and then we go from there
Question: Can I ask to this one a follow-up question?
Herald: If it's a quick follow-up question, go ahead.
Question: The question is quick, the answer might be not.
Like when you see this talk and what is the opposite with the Treadwife movement.
Philo: Oh, ouch.
Herald: Yes I think you opened a can of worms there.
Philo: I think that would be a talk in itself. I strongly object to right-wing
people to steal my craft for bullshit reasons. *applause*
Thank you.There are, I think, still a couple of people
wanting to ask questions. Can people find you somewhere after the talk now?
Philo: Yeah I might be hanging around either at the Haecksen or Millyways.
I'm very sorry, I've been trying to find out how to live in
the Fediverse and I haven't had time yet. I'm
still on the Instagram, I'm sorry for that. But I'm
working on it, I have a support troop around me
and they do their best to have me more accessible
in spheres that are not that problematic.