Thread-like Growth on Animated Beings
publication, edition of 50 copies, Riso-printed
2x booklets bound in folder, 28p, 19x29 cm, English
2025
Thread-like Growth on Animated Beings is published on the occasion of Archive Event IX: je file un fil pour ma fille by Marie Ilse Bourlanges, hosted at Looiersgracht 60 in Amsterdam, from 25 to 29 June 2025. Bourlanges revisits Pollinating Agents: Resilient Beings (2021), an essay developed during her artistic research fellowship at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, expanding into a second text titled Thread-like Growth on Animated Beings (2025), which takes as a starting point a playful definition she encountered of the word ‘hair’. Sketching alternative models for interspecies coexistence and mutual dependency, building on practices like cleaning symbiosis, kiss-feeding, the human domestication of sheep, and the globalization of the wool trade, she explores unexpected ways of being with others. Composed as a stream-of-consciousness, Bourlanges’ text parallels these ideas to her relationship with her daughter, delving into the layered and sometimes conflicting experiences of motherhood.
Written fragments, sourced texts, and visual ephemera emphasize fleeting encounters and relational practices across and between human and non-human worlds, materialize a form of embodied knowledge contained in acts of gathering and assembling that precede the Archive, governed through proximity and drift. Printed in Riso and presented in a limited edition of 50, these delicately assembled volumes were presented alongside a curated selection of titles hand-picked by Bourlanges.
How can the Archive account for the invisible threads that draw fragments of experience, memory, and material together, which come to shape how we know, remember, and relate? Can artistic practices make space for what the archive cannot hold: the partial, the sensory, the unresolved?
Credits:
Concept and text by Marie Ilse Bourlanges
Edited by Liza Prins
Curated by Soraya Notoadikusumo and Nadine Snijders
Production assistance by Nadine Helmy
Printed at Terry Bleu, Amsterdam, June 2025
Photos by LNDWstudio
Cover images
01 Bourlanges, je file un fil pour ma fille, 2023 (still of video)
02 Bourlanges, je file un fil pour ma fille, 2023 (still of video, filmed by Carmen Gray)
Titles of Temporary Bookshop:
Briggs, K. (2023). The Long Form. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Cluitmans, L., & Ten Cate, H. (Eds.). (2025). Mothering Myths: An ABC of Art, Birth and Care. Valiz.
Coulthard, S. (2020). A Short History of the World According to Sheep. Apollo.
Davey, M. (Ed.). (2001). Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. Seven Stories Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press.
Henrot, C. (2023). Milkyways. Hatje Cantz.
Meijer, E. (2019). When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy. NYU Press.
Nelson, M. (2015). The Argonauts. Graywolf Press.
Shafak, E. (2011). Black Milk: On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity, and Motherhood. Penguin Books.
Studio Formafantasma. (2023). Oltre Terra. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
