The New Year

It is mind-blowing that Sourced Material has only been around for half a year. We emerged out of this summer while Jake Levin sat anxiously surrounded by raw wool in a dirty metal shop at the MFA program at Bard College. Since then so much has happened. We have launched a gorgeous website developed and designed by Sourced Material co founder Silka Glanzman (along with diving head on into the world of social-media/web 2.0). We have exhibited Sourced Material: Wool at Bard and in Brooklyn at Flatbreadaffair, for their inaugural show. We have hosted several lamb-based feasts (with the help of Flatbreadaffair partner/chef Leah Rinaldi). Jake was interviewed about Sourced Material by Sierra Radio and by David Horvitz for 127Prince. We have successfully exchanged all of our wool products thanks to the overwhelmingly eager response from participants from all over the US. Jake apprenticed at Fleishers Meats for three months learning the craft of whole animal butchery from some master butchers. Now he and Sourced Material are ready to explore the whole animal! And now it is almost a new year.

Here are some of our thoughts, plans, and resolutions for the new year. We are definitely going to do some whole animal butchery demos/feasts this year! We are going to have a small show of all the objects made through the Wool exchange program. We want to explore making paper. KNIVES! We want to start looking into the possibilities of pop-up stores. We are always looking for new people to participate and explore with. We are interested in the idea of Sourced Material exploring a region rather than  a specific material- maybe the Southern Berkshire Hills. We are excited to see what surprises 2011 brings for us!
Mostly we want to wish you a happy New Years and thank everyone for supporting us!!!

Web 2.O

Sourced Material loves exploring the marketing and community-building possibilities of Web 2.0 - as does any social organization that wants to remain relevant. We have our website, our blog, and a Facebook page- and we're about to start tweeting.  Web 2.0 and the internet provide a platform for public exposure, but more importantly they provide a forum for communication and community-building that can span international borders. While on the ground level Sourced Material is a part of a face-to-face community of producers, processors,  and consumers- via the web we have formed a global community of supporters and participants. The web also allows us to exist beyond the traditional gallery or retail system. Through our website we are able to have a gallery, an e-store, and a bartering system that anyone can participate in anywhere. A lot of the power of the internet has to do with its formlessness (a concept first described by Georges Bataille and one which is dear to our hearts).

It is the formlessness of  the internet that makes the Web 2.0's instant mass-communication and sharing abilities, a powerful social and political phenomenon. The ability to communicate, via text, image, or sound- anywhere, anytime, with anybody is an invaluable tool- one of the first truly anarchic and democratic communication devices. There is a really interesting article in this week's New Yorker, by Malcolm Gladwell, titled "Twitter, Facebook, and social activism". As always Gladwell's essay is intelligent, insightful and well researched. But he misses the point about the power of internet and Web 2.0. While the analogy to the American Civil Rights movement of the 60's is interesting and brings up some good points, overall it is not a useful analogy. That was a different era and needed a different form of social organization. he relationship between vertically integrated, hierarchical organizations and laterally sprawling networks of citizen activists is not a zero-sum game. Twitter/FB are tools that that traditional organizations can use to disseminate information and organize followers cheaply and in real time. Many forms of social activism do work by large numbers of "small" acts--get out the vote, letter writing campaigns, legistlative referendums. These are not trivial mechanisms for social change.

Web 2.0 offers is the anonymous and instant organizing of people for  things like flashmobs. Flashmobs have their own unique political power- the lack of hierarchy and the anonymity has an anarchic power that leaves the repressive powers dazed and confused. People arrive they do something and they vanish, there is no one accountable person or specific organization, it is people coming together because they share a point of view and want it to known. The civil rights movement made great strides under MLK's leadership, but his assassination was a major blow for the movement from which it never totally recovered; heirarchical groups have a human body, one bullet can cripple the whole body. Lateral organizations are more like a cell, constantly dividing into discreet bodies working together.

Besides social organizing and protesting, Web 2.O allows other kinds of politcal action and participation which was not available before. My favorite example, and one that Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker colleague Evan Osnos wrote about in May the artist Ai Weiwei. He is a fascinating contemporary artists and he uses twitter to allow anyone to follow his daily thoughts and moves. He has also used it to keep himself and others from being arrested and brutalized by the Chinese government as well as forcing the Chinese government to release information. His cult like status and use of twitter has kept him one step head of the Chinese government in ways that would be impossible with out twitter. There is a lot more to say about this and a lot more to read. These are just some of our reactions. We recommend that you read more about Ai Weiwei as well as reading The Coming Insurrection.

Knives

We love knives. Whether it's for cooking, carving, hunting, or foraging we cant' have enough sharp blades with beautiful handles. Some of our personal favorites are our Japanese Shun chef's knife for carving meat (it will be wielded by Jake Levin at the Sourced Material: Wool opening at flatbreadaffair) and our Swedish made mushroom knife. We often make fun of (Sourced Material artist and blade fanatic) Will Levin for always having at least three knives in his pick-up truck, not to mention the scores of sharp blades he has in his Wood-shop.

In today's  NY Times Men's Fashion magazine there was a cool piece, Blade Runners, about a series of knives that had been made by different European designers all based on the traditional Sammi (the nomadic people of the Nordic) knife, the leuku. These knives are beautiful and we appreciate the designers' combination of veneration and innovation. There was also an interesting article recently about professional cutlery sharpeners in New York City, Venerable Craft, Modern Practitioner. It is an important reminder of the overlooked ancient crafts that are still alive today in such cyber-tech obsessed urban areas.

Living Museums!!

We love going to open-air, or living, museums. One our favorites is Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires. We love being able to see and walk through the actual buildings that people have lived in, touch the actual tools people used, and see trained crafts-people employing the techniques and tools people used so long ago. We're always struck by the ways things haven't changed, and by the many ways in which we can learn from traditional techniques and technologies. Here in Sweden we had the pleasure of going to two open-air museums- one in Stockholm, called Skansen, the other here in Gotland, called Bunge Museum.

Skansen is by far the best and largest open-air museum we have ever visited. One of our favoirte cottages found in Skansen is pictured at the beginning of this post. The Bunge museum had an impressive array of old tools which, of course, we were very exicted about. We wanted to show some of the amazing old spinning tools we saw at Bunge Museum (seen both above and below), many of them not so different from the ones used for Sourced Material: Wool.

Gotland's Crafts

As we talked to Gunilla about our interest in craft traditions and our current Sourced Material: Wool project she got excited. She immediately listed a name of people and places we could go visit and talk to around Gotland. We were excited to see what things we could learn here. Soon Gunilla, along with her sister-in-law Anna had planned a day of crafting and learning for us.

Gotland's economy used to be based on agriculture- root vegetables and Gotland sheep- but now its economy is built mainly on tourism. While there is still a lot of agriculture- like Frans' farm, as well as limestone mining and processing- it's tourism that creates the most money here. Gotland's tourism industry has allowed for a revival of crafts and cultural traditions. Tourist come here wanting to find 'authentic' Gotlandish products, which means the people living here have to produce them.

We see this happening in lots of rural areas that see lots of tourism, like Jake Levin's home, the Berkshires. This creates a complicated situation for the people who produce these objects. On the one hand it's wonderful that there is once again an economy for these local products and traditions, but on the other hand it can have an alienating effect- a feeling that one is producing these for an outside market. The touristic-fetishizing of these objects also drives up their prices. On one hand it's good, as it means more income for the local producer, but on the other hand it often means the community can not afford their own local products.

Not surprisingly, the majority of crafts in Gotland have there source in the agriculture here: wool and food (jams, honey, breads). Most of these craft-objects can be bought in the small shops that accompany many of the farms. They can also be found in tourist centers, boutiques in larger towns like Visby, and in small ateliers throughout the island where products- ceramics, candles, textiles, etc- are made and sold.

Our first stop with Gunilla and Anna was in Vallstena, at Ullverkstan Vallstena(Vallstena Wool-workshop), a beautiful wool crafts store and felting studio run by Annika Grandelius. Annika's shop was really exciting, we were immediately inspired. We told her a little bit about Sourced Material: Wool, and she went on to teach us some new techniques in her light-filled and airy studio. Annika has traveled all over Europe and a little in North Africa, learning about different felting techniques and making connections with different felters (she is particularly involved with a group of crafts-people in Estonia). But she is dedicated to using her own wool, from Gotland sheep, and cleaning and dying it herself.

Next we went to southern Gotland, to the town of Hemse. There we visited Gotlands Spinneri where the bulk of Gotland's wool is spun. The Gotland Spinneri has a fascinating history. In 2001 it was announced that the old Hablingbo Spinneri was to be closed and thus the machines, most dating to the 1920's, were going to be broken up and sold leaving Gotland without a wool mill. People in the local textile community were extremely upset at this news and immediately jumped to action. A group of woman organized and wrote letters to people asking to purchase a share of the mill (at 1000 kronors) and become a supporting member of the Hablingbo Wool-mill Economic Union. Their efforts were successful. After organizing a governing board and finding a home for the machinery they started to process wool again for Gotland. Anna is a member of co the-op and spins the wool from Frans' sheep here, which she then sells in her shop. The whole scene is quite beautiful- a bustling site of machinery and grey Gotland wool.