Transmission: what do we pass on?
Knowledge, stories, rituals and memories are passed from one generation to the next.
Some threads are literally visible — woven into textiles, recorded in manuscripts, preserved in architecture or worn into a path. Others are more fleeting: a melody, a voice, a repeated gesture or a story passed down within a community.
But transmission never simply means preservation. Every act of remembering also involves selection, interpretation and transformation. An archive tells us what was preserved, but equally what disappeared or was never recorded.
Several artists take precisely this tension as their starting point.
- Palestinian artist Noor Abed presents A Night We Held Between (2024), in which song, dance, film and Palestinian landscapes come together to create a form of collective memory. A song from the archive of the Popular Art Centre Palestine becomes a vehicle for grief, displacement, solidarity and survival.
- With Julia Isídrez, knowledge is passed on through hands and material. Her ceramic sculptures draw on Guaraní traditions she learned through her mother and generations of women. Clay becomes landscape, memory and living knowledge at once.
- Colombian artist María Angélica Medina makes this transmission literally visible through thread. Her ongoing Pieza de conversación (1988–) has continued to grow for decades as she knits. Conversations, silence and shared time become part of the artwork.
- Erik Tlaseca likewise sees tradition as something living. His Xipe series was created through long-term collaboration with craftspeople in Oaxaca. Techniques and materials are not simply preserved, but transformed through collaboration, exchange and new contexts.
- Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña uses the Andean tradition of knotted cords as a living, poetic language in Quipu Austral. Wool, voice and sound connect different landscapes and knowledge systems, presenting memory as something that is continually woven anew.
