letter from afar / movana chen
artomity issue 5 summer 2017
27.04.2017
I’m landing back in Los Angeles soon. The last time I arrived here a month ago, I didn’t know anyone. This time it is like going back home: I have lots of friends to catch up with.
Since 2011 I’ve been knitting shredded books from more than 150 friends around the world as part of Knitting Conversations; the most recent iteration was in Los Angeles. I’m collecting more beautiful stories and creating new connections every day as part of an on-site residency at the 14th Factory exhibition. Like a magnet, knitting brings everyone together, creating a journey for audiences to experience different ways of life though the conversations that happen during the process. One audience member told me: “Knitting Conversations is the perfect marriage of art and literature.”
Travelling into your Bookshelf is another ongoing project that keeps me on the road. Since 2009 I have been invited to travel to London, Milan, Paris, Soul, Philadelphia, Michigan, Sicily, Melbourne, Hannover, Berlin, Venice, Istanbul, Cappadocia, Siberia, Moscow, Los Angeles and Joshua Tree National Park, California. Every journey ends in an unknot place, travelling with my big suitcase and my work, and meeting new people along the way. It is a knitted world, where the intertwined paths allow me to taste an impossible dream-world, a never-ending story that crosses times, places, people, cultures and loves: reading and weaving people’s stories, exploring memories, and learning about new cultures and languages. I think I am very lucky as an artist to have the Travelling Bookshelf as a life-time project: when I travel to a nw place, I am not arriving alone. It is always a moment of joy at being together, being connected, and especially knitting new relationships.
I had an unforgettable experience with my Travelling Bookshelf last winter: time-travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk. In over 68 hours I crossed four time zones, lost in time, places and languages. Every day the train would stop at a small town for between five and 20 minutes, and it as magical to step off into a different time zone, a different world of real-time theatre; then, when you get back on the train, the clock is set to Moscow time, I was lost in time.
At midnight on the second day I could see heavy snow out of the window. Some passengers got off, some got on; two Russian soldiers came into my cabin and went to sleep in the bunks above me without talking. The conversations started next morning when they saw me knitting, and then they all started joining in. I spoke English; they spoke Russian; there was no internet and no Google Translate. So just like the old times we drew symbols, exchanging stories through pictures. We were all fuelled by curiosity.
The train ran for another 30 hours. When all my new friends got off, it left me on the train feeling sad. Then I got to Krasnoyarsk, where it was -19C and it as only beginning of winter; I wondered how people can live in such cold weather. This had been a very challenging journey for me.
And now I’m back in LA, my next destination.
