So what ‘s the inspiration for the Winterlude Urban Cozy Project  next month?

Throughout the years we’ve definitely been inspired by urban art/craft movements around the world and our love for cities. Here’s some examples (all the photos can be found here):

Knitting up around monuments and Parliament Hill in Ottawa (2005)

Spotting sticker art in Ottawa (2008)

Making textile flowers for a unique garden with Janet Morton at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (2007)

Creating wet felt graffiti at the World Urban Forum in Vancouver (2006)

Graffiti in San Fran’s Mission District (2007)

Checking out Banksy’s and other graffiti artists’ work in London at the Cans Festival (2008)

Spotting Space Invader blocks in London (and Paris, Barcelona and Amsterdam) (2007-8)

Taking photos of statues and my UFOs (unfinished knitting objects) in Berlin (2005)

Spotting strands of knit graffiti outside a yarn store in Mitte, Berlin (2005)

 

Smiling Disposal Bins in Copenhagen (2008)

Lady spinning some wool at Museum of London’s Create @ Late series, May 2008

An excellent article appeared in the Guardian this week titled Amid the economic rubble, a revolution is being knitted. No it’s not another article stating that knitting is back during the economic crisis. It goes much further than that in positioning the resurgence of craft in a fresh, subtle way. The author, Libby Brooks, argues that four factors – tactility, time, nourishment and egalitarianism – have led to the revival of craft during the recession. Worth a read if you get a chance.

Two publications relating to craft that Brooks mentions in the article are also worth reading:

• Expressive Lives, a collection of essays released by London-based think thank Demos, argues that through culture we find our place in the world; thus, cultural policy should enable citizens to take an active role in shaping their world. One chapter by Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery, pays homage to the egalitarianism of the arts and crafts movement and how that might affect cultural institutions.
• The Craftsman, by prominent sociologist/urban studies professor Richard Sennett, who, through historical, cultural and social lenses, holds that the idea of craftsman extends beyond traditional skilled manual labour. The term craftsman can be applied to the computer programmer, the doctor and the many other people who do a job well for its own sake and employ various tools, materials and skills to do so.

The creation of a manifesto and a respected international cultural institution legitimizing and defining this “new” culture may shift the way we think about the process of creating, art, connecting with others and our cultural identities.

Here’s their manifesto:
*A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture

*Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live

*Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe

*Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture

*This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing

*Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves

*Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

Check out the cartoon that explains what “Altermodern” is.