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13 The Linen Project;

Our current fashion market is focused on economic growth and financial profit. It is a market that is producing at increasingly cheaper rates, in poor quality, under exploitative working conditions, and with a draining impact on our ecosystem. Consumers, on the other hand, are disconnected from the production process, making it harder to develop a critical understanding of the origin of the products we use daily and with which we surround ourselves.

With The Linen Project, the Dutch Crafts Council and ArtEZ Master Fashion Design propose a focus on the local, small-scale productions that are traceable and sustainable. We see a countermovement emerging that we want to encourage: the growing interest in the search for connection with the production process of the products we use and consume daily. With this project, we want to give an example of the possibilities for making better fashion from beginning to end as a joined effort.

With The Linen Project, we study the production of flax, linen, and (linen) products to propose ways to revive these resources sustainably. The Linen Project activates ‘old’ knowledge, skills, and the different meanings associated with flax and linen production, combined with new technologies and possibilities. In a broader framework, The Linen Project proposes a new cultural logic for our current fashion system. By no longer defining design as just a product, but situating it as one of the processes in a more extensive set of complementary and reinforcing activities for which we need to take responsibility. Together we explore research and activate the economic viability of small-scale linen production in the Netherlands and other localities. Only by committing to the challenge of trying out different ways of making
than we are used to, we imagine a meaningful fashion in the future.

Website:: http://craftscouncil.nl/en/the-linen-project-2/,
Connections—internal:: Master Fashion Design (Practice Held in Common),
Connections—external:: Avans University of Applied Sciences, Biologische boerderij de Horsterhof, Dutch Crafts Council, Ekoboerderij De Lingehof, Hochschule Niederrhein Mönchengladbach, Netherlands Open Air Museum, Wageningen University & Research,
Values—being:: Propositional,
Values—doing:: acting, co-creating, committing, situating,

Practicing Possible Futures; Research, School, Platform; ArtEZ University of the Arts;

We begin with a question: What possible futures do we want to make? It is a question that raises uncertainty and provokes complexity. As practitioners in the arts, we practise occupying uncertainty and taking on complexity to create new possibilities. We want to use the power of possibilities to create new forms of expressing the future. As researchers in the arts, we strive to produce new ways of making sense of the future that we want to make together.

Futures have always been the realm of the unknown, subject to predictions and projections, fashions, and forecasts. However, the current state of emerging urgencies is also making them precarious—scarce, uneven, and not commonly available. At the same time, our global social, political, economic, human, and environmental resources face depletion. The need to make another future possible is apparent.

The clarion call for future-making has to be heard with caution. Overemphasis on the future as a resolution of contemporary crises abandons our responsibility for action in the present. Utopian visions of the future as a safe space can encourage the suspension of civil rights and liberties and even foster authoritarianism. The resignation to imminent threat can normalise apathy towards our collective well-being. These predetermined scripts for futurity reduce the future to a commodity and a finite resource.

And yet, deep in the heart of art is the capacity to create futures that are infinitely creative and chimerical, whimsical and wondrous. The ArtEZ Research Centre is premised on the foundational belief that art is a force of change and imagines new others—other worlds, ways, times, spaces, bodies, us—other futures. This capacity to imagine, visualise, formulate, and materialise the future, not just as a function of time, but as a possibility of collective hope, is what we call practice.

Practice is a continuous conversation that takes critical, aesthetic, and political positions. It is a dialogue generated by bringing together different needs, questions, opportunities, interests, knowledges, expertise, and processes to create possible futures. At ArtEZ, research in the arts is an articulation, analysis, and critique of the expression of resilience, equity, diversity, in the making of these futures. What kind of futures? Whose futures? Who do we make them with? Who are we when we step up to make them?

Research in the arts emphasises that these practices of possible futures are incomplete, just-begun, and in-the-making. They need a glossary of common values and a lexicon of methods to identify what we do and how. Simultaneously, it needs critical reflexivity that questions the foregrounding of certain voices and makes space for missing experiences, to unsettle our knowledge and create conditions for collective futures.

Practicing Possible Futures is a portfolio of research in the arts at ArtEZ that illustrates the capacity of our artistic expression to shape the world we live in, our commitment to imagine and expand the possibilities of collective intervention, and our role as researchers in the arts to bring forth futures worth fighting for.

Team Practicing Possible Futures—ArtEZ; Anniek Brattinga, Carin Rustema, John Johnston, Krista Jantowski, Leon Filter, Marie Trei, Nishant Shah, Vincent Zhong,
Text; Krista Jantowski, Leon Filter, Vincent Zhong,
Design Website; Dorothee Dähler, Simon Rüegg,
Development Website; Simon Rüegg,
Design Identity; Dorothee Dähler, Yeliz Secerli,
Last Update; 10/12/2020,

ArtEZ University of the Arts;
Onderlangs 9, 6812 CE Arnhem, the Netherlands;
Postbox 49, 6800 AA Arnhem, the Netherlands;

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