Gestures of Resistance: The Slow Assertions of Craft
Edited by Judith Leemann and Shannon R. Stratton

[currently in development]

An anthology dedicated to surveying the intersection of hand-madeness and slowness, Gestures of Resistance posits craft as methodology, extending its province to a range of performances that embody care through deliberate movements and canny gesture. In this volume, we create for ourselves the task of understanding: exactly what category of creative action might include walking, mending, shop-dropping and mile-knitting? We argue that the least interesting way to use the word craft is as a materially determined category (fibers, ceramics) or one which is process-defined (knitted, turned, blown), finding renewed value in crafting as a flavor of making, as an orientation to time and circumstance.

To wit, the question that gets us going is how crafting functions and when ? How, in the intersecting assertions of crafting and slowness, there arise seemingly modest gestures of hand or body that unexpectedly deliver the promise of agency. And how is it that in the evidence of that agency – whether concrete objects or ephemeral residue or without trace (just the affect of memory as its only testimony) – there is the very thing capable of moving us, of suggesting alternate routes, third ways, subversive pleasures?

Gestures of Resistance is a timely collection of writing that addresses what it means to create, to have personal agency and to reject the numbing, conjoined drives for productivity and consumption. In a time fraught with anxiety over globalism, ecological decline, economic uncertainty and political mistrust, how might these impotent gestures (too quiet, too slow, too forlorn or too remote) be precisely what buoys us? The role of the Avant-garde has shifted away from the interrogation of mass-culture by elite thinkers. The new Avant-garde reinvents the practice of making as a node in a relational matrix, where the lay person can discover ways of operating that navigate outside the standard options of republican and democrat, insider or rebel, Starbucks or Starbucks.

Through writings and meditations on making and makers, as well as on the meaning of slowness and agency, Gestures of Resistance: The Slow Assertions of Craft delineates and then proceeds to interrogate a species of action in which self-conscious crafting, contextual mischief-making, and cultural re-scripting play themselves out .