Hiromi Nakajima

The Bayeux Tapestry

A Stitch In Time

Waugh Office is developing an ambitious remix of The Bayeux Tapestry.

1066 was the year a comet appeared in the sky; boats set sail, horses galloped, arrows fell and blood spilled, radically transforming power structures in Britain and France. We know this because of the survival of The Bayeux Tapestry, this soft and fragile fabric was part of the dialogue between Macron and May during the infamous impasse of

EU negotiations, it was agreed it could be exhibited in the UK but this is yet to transpire.

Substantial research into the structural integrity of the embroidery was needed and conservation undertaken. On that thematic or running with threads of materialism and its fault lines or subtexts, not many kilometres from Bayeux is the legendary Château de Cerisy La Salle.

For those who know this modest bastion has disseminated the soft and incisive power of French intellectual thought through its illustrious meetings and publications. Waugh Office as a curatorial agent, disposed to placing things together and in dialogue, imagines an opportunity for artists and theorists to sample small details of these contingent histories and deploy contemporary technologies to animate ideas and address a series of questions including; “What is the soft power of art?”

Politicians have adopted this phrase but perhaps its diplomatic idiom needs some unstitching and what better place to start than with arguably the most famous textile artwork in the world The Bayeux

We have in our research begun to answer the question: “what is soft power?“

This begins again on the roads back to that Château and dialogues that occurred there in the post war period. In particular we are thinking for an instant that is both now and forever; held in the possibility of rearing “peace” after a war and the jests and gestures that might be required to understand how Martin Heidegger in 1957 stood next to Jacques Lacan and others and thought you might teach peace through ideas of “origin” and a question “What is that - Philosophy?” perhaps naively he tried to herd an audience back into a world not torn apart at its origins and in fragments.

Horses doing headstands …

Forward to a text that has written itself and must occupy this place with an attention to how we can adopt a running stitch that loops in diverse cultures into our leap of faith; a thread caught and made visible like a spiders silk in the Summer Sun, an unwrapping of the multiplicity in a web of connections and resistance; what is the most gentle resistance or soft power that can be a foreword to history; after genocide and other atrocities remain very visible? Could the embroidery at Bayeux be such a text?

How could such silence breed so many gentle hours of threading and dying of narratives that even in extremes of chaos and violence can raise a smile? How can horses doing headstands and men whose limbs are detached from their bodies release elicit sympathies and solicit us to consider this battle and coronation prologue to also be a

pretext, or excuse even for women to come together?

In a general multiplicity of hands and eyes to own the moment however finite and in owing it, disrupt the control of power.

There was no Marshall McLuhan to warn Bishop Odo

It is in their flight that the velocity of arrows and horses would signify the end of the Viking epoch of axe and shield and announce the turning of the Europe towards new domains of antagonism and land grabs; Holy Wars and the deterritorialisation of tribal systems under ideologies of a single witness to truth. This relic begins a remapping of

borders in its indigo woad and madder red.

Under the signs of the astrological and the almighty, fatalism of monarchy ordained by God himself via Rome, this text comes to displace the rural and marginal excellence of the Abbeys of Anglo Saxon Britain with their scroll and knot work in those dark age

retellings of the gospel. The Bayeux Tapestry unfolds a linear treatise on how to fix history in the image of its authors. However, there is a catch, the thread that sticks and breaks is too taught in its presumptive power and too loose with the issue of the medium.

There was no Marshall McLuhan to warn Bishop Odo that somebody would have to code the work. It is a neoliberal dilemma, CEOs, Presidents and various arbiters of power, will not because they cannot, do the coding or stitching together in the materiality of a moment. There is a point in time that can be interacted with, commented upon

and conserved using reversible protocols.

In this making, an aesthetic emerges not as a synthesis in the sense of an AI rendering of a tank, but rather in the slower subconscious pulling of shapes through abstract lines, the close stitches of the embroiderer and the tight codes of intuitive syntax.

In this slippage of code many have seen their own histories

It is into this time between coding and becoming that we want to be with others; those from around the World who have found in the hands and faces of the subjects of Bayeux some signalling of colonised people and in this slippage of code many have seen their own histories.

The South African Women’s Project’s, “The Keiskamma Tapestry” started in 2004 for example found the 1000 year old testimony resonates with the struggles for justice of Black women under Apartheid and the ongoing issues of a new South Africa. This work is

on permanent display where politicians can see it daily and it holds them to account, to deliver the promise of a better life that honours the dead who have paved the way. It is on loan from the Standard Bank Corporate Art Collection Of South Africa.

Did these embroiders theorise as they stitched and placed vitality in their work? Is it imagination which haunts and connects them to that scene in Hastings almost a millennia ago? In smoke and failing light those Kentish women worked on the embroidery in the aftermath of 1066 and all that blood and spoiled flesh, marked and humiliated bodies, oppressed to the point of disappearance, dehumanised for

speaking the wrong language and erased or so it seemed in the formation of the figures before them.ideas are stitched like threads and needles.

It seems that women saw embroidery as a way of reclaiming history, taking the grand, violent battlefield scenes and transforming them into patterns and fantasy. How can this be possible without it also being a betrayal of the dead? It is necessary to treat their inheritance as one would a serious and fatal injury.

history can always take a more ferocious and brutal turn as images are relayed on FaceBook or Telegram

"The Palestinian History Tapestry", has traveled across the world to share its regional stitches and style with international audiences. In Edinburgh in 2021 it was exhibited and celebrated with little sense of how history can always take a more ferocious and brutal turn, as images are relayed on FaceBook. and Telegram.

We are together and sticking to our collective thread of remembrance and turning back, to Ariadne and all those Greek myths that Martin Heidegger supposed would grow back over the Third Reich and make Europe great again. We are here not for ethnic show trials but ethical show how’s ... how to break out of the labyrinth?

the powers of our Sun and a changing atmosphere, draining it of colour

The Black Gold Tapestry, we turn lastly in this brief text to the work of Canadian artist Sandra M. Sawatzky, thier individual work, “The Black Gold Tapestry” tells a collective story of fossil fuels. It was an epic and obsessive work consuming hours and hours in the solitude of precarious labour. In that time perhaps the artist was also in some invisible dialogue with others around the world who were also concerned with issues of

pollution and climate crisis and the stitches required to pull the Earth out of a catastrophic turn?

The artist has calculated a sixth of her life was spent on the task, we do not know how long it took to make The Bayeux Tapestry but we do know that Knights were paid more than Yeoman and nuns were often not paid at all. Besides such material calculations we understand that for almost a thousand years those threads have held our attention and

inspired lapses of reason and irresponsible speculation.

There is a tender time that invites us, the time to relax and reflect on the transformation of natural dyes over time and the slow exposures of the cloth that might eventually drain it of all colour. It is victim to the powers of our Sun and a changing atmosphere, draining it of colour and strength, until it becomes an artwork best read with the fingertips as a tactile surface, camouflaged to the eyes of history.

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