Textilesphere: To mark is to be marked

The link between textile and place explored in disciplines such as architecture, media, film studies, and visual art often focuses on haptic visuality and surface luminosity (Bruno 2014). This paper instead seeks to approach the link from the tactual and affective materiality of textile, emphasising the aspect of ‘lived’ environment as a matrix of indexical traces. The paper suggests ‘textile-sphere’ as a new category, encompassing all ‘lived’ surface in the everyday environment. As Peter Altenberg wrote in ‘In Munich’, the dwelling and the objects it contains are like the epidermis of the dweller, forming a collective organism. As the material closest to the body, textile is the paradigm of surfaces and places engendered through living as marking, Whilst textile is a receiving material that can be marked by staining, imprinting, and moulding, it is also an agential material that marks our bodies and psyches through its affective presence. The English word ‘mark’ shares the same origin with the word ‘margin,’ revealing its affinity with the notion of localisation and territorialisation. Marking and being marked, then, is the condition for existing through becoming, which might explain the human compulsion to mark the skin, cloth, walls, writing paper, and other everyday surfaces, building 'archi-textures' (Lefebvre). Through such an understanding, it is possible to conflate various everyday surfaces and spaces as ‘textilesphere’, a lived space with palimpsestic and mimetic quality like the Skin Ego (Anzieu). This idea will be explored drawing on examples of Paracinema (Walley) and Pedro Almodóvar’s film The Skin I Live In (2011) to draw attention to the presence or the absence of indexical traces in our everyday environment