Blade Runner, Memories and TIF

One of my all time favorite movies is Blade Runner and i believe, paraphrasing here, almost anything in life can relate to it. Take our case in question this month's TIF topic, memories.
The replicants, who are robots in a world divided into humans and replicants, are so human that they miss having personal memories. There is something very human in keeping memories, and sharing them. And in a very touching gesture they steal photos from humans in order to construct their own memories.
There's also a beautiful invocation by Roy Batty, the most perfect replicant about memories that is actually his death poem, as in ritual sepukku.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die." (Roy)

i hope to have enticed you to look for the movie and watch it. i usually do not go for sci-fi, but this one goes beyond that label. It is a cult movie. And it's a treat to see a young Harrison Ford :)

As for me i kept working some more along the boxed memories metaphor using knitted wire. Don't know if it happens to you but once i get going with the concept i can't stop, had a couple more half finished projects for last month. However, i'm doing a lot of loom work now so i'm done for this month's TIF.

i was looking here for simplicity and i think i can't simplify more than this piece.
Game over.

neki desu

loom controlled shibori memories for TIF

i remember being five or six sitting in my grandmother's living room waiting in anticipation for uncle Erasmus to arrive from one of his trips. Can you believe his name? He was my grandmother's brother and my great grandfather had named the kids Erasmus, Virgil and Homer. They missed a Dante. It was a girl, my grandma.
He was a great traveler and had all those stories to tell , so the family would gather around him and listen spellbound. Distant places, different rites, other languages i think he imbued the wander lust in me.
i also remember when i was around nine or ten my parents gave me the book Around the World in 2,000 pictures. Being an only child at that time, i would spend days and days examining the black and white photos and dreaming of being there. There were two that, heavens know why, called my attention most of all and made them very special to me.

One was of human towers, men standing on each other's shoulders forming single pillars. There was another variety that was pillar within pillar, the base being like a hurdle to support all that weight.
The other was a picture of the strangest building that i had ever seen. It was a stone boat like structure with a turret docked in the water . i wanted to know why would someone build a boat in stone, yet put it in the water. At that time i didn't know, but that was an oxymoron.

i remember watching Rome Adventure with Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette and dying to get her hairdo and go to Rome.Troy Donahue, o.k. if i got him, but what i really wanted was to go to Rome and walk those streets and see those colors.

Fast forward to the seventies when i lived in Rome. i remember those colors and the discovery of light, changing light during the day and over the seasons. Coming from the tropics where light is always the same, blinding, it was a revelation.

Many moons later i came to Barcelona for weaving reasons and was surprised to find the human towers were part of the Catalan folklore. i began to have a floating feeling, that of having closed a circle. And i stayed here.
And yet more moons afterwards one day while walking along the Tejo in Lisbon i saw the fascinating odd structure of my childhood. The Tower of Belem! i had to explain my husband what was all that excitement about lest he think that i was suffering from heat stroke.


All those memories neatly packed in boxes.

neki desu

loom controlled shibori

Here's take one finished. Aiming at getting mokume (woodgrain) shibori with those zig zags. The stamped red motifs will not dye, so they will act as extra visual texture.

Here's the second one in a diamond pattern. i stamped the warp with Pebeo soie paints in a square grid pattern. The weft is a washed denim blue silk and i'm thinking of discharging some parts and then dyeing. The warp is this silk, beautiful doupioni to look at, difficult to work with as it is fuzzy.

Loom controlled shibori offers an enormousist of possibilities. One can:

• weave in white and then dye
• weave with a colored warp and then dye
• weave with a white warp and a colored weft and then dye
• weave and discharge and then dye
• stamp with paints weave and dye
• stamp with fiber reactive dyes weave and dye
• stamp with fiber reactive dyes, discharge, weave and dye

and lots of other combinations.

As the weavings im working on are just 20 x 20 centimeters i am aiming at using this project as my February TIF hence the printed square grid. Squares are flattened boxes aren't they? :)
The caveat is that when weaving i use that time to do some hard thinking-thinking without obligation- and i would also like to work on a dimensional piece for the challenge.
Yet here i am blogging. Better get back to the loom or March will get me in front of the computer.

neki desu