Ecologies of Making

Ecologies of Making
The Knowing Body

Ecologies of Making begins with the premise that to know a place is to make with it. Arriving opens an evolving process of discovery, much of which cannot be planned or anticipated. It begins with observing and listening and develops through relationships with the people who live there, their culture, and the histories embodied in local materials and infrastructures. For the artist, knowing is a bodily experience mediated by touch and familiar movements. The exhibition traces this process of discovery through the projects developed by Elena Redaelli in Taiwan since the beginning of her residency programme at the Art Site of the Railway Warehouse. Together, the works reveal a practice shaped by material encounters and relationships formed over time.
The gesture of making is the point at which a sensing body meets matter and curiosity arises. From pulling a rope to repeatedly folding paper, each movement is rooted in a particular material history while belonging to a wider bodily language. Through touch and repetition, movements become embodied and pass between people. As hands respond to matter, form grows alongside shared knowledge. This knowledge cannot be separated from the act of making; it resides in a body that learns how to respond. Making becomes a language held in common, connecting artistic practice with everyday labour.
Each work takes form within a wide field of relations in which materials, animals, inherited histories, and less visible forces of the environment also participate, extending collaboration beyond human participants. As María Puig de la Bellacasa writes, “nothing holds together without relations of care” (2017, 67). Care lies in sustaining a process while remaining attentive to each of its participants. As materials pass between hands, knowledge circulates without being detached from the lives and circumstances from which it emerged. The resulting forms retain the marks of these encounters, opening individual authorship to shared experience.
Each material enters the exhibition with a history to tell and its own, sometimes stubborn, behaviour. Jane Bennett names this force “Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (2010, 6). Matter is therefore not a passive support: it redirects the making and continues to change beyond the artist’s intervention. Concrete retains a detailed image of the body. Oyster shells carry the smell and memories of coastal lives within changing ecologies. Discarded PVC banners and safety nets from Taiwanese highway construction sites bear traces of local industry, while paper found in its place of production records repeated touch and gradual weathering.
These materials become living records of place, brought together in an exhibition that unfolds as an evolving journal. Their meanings remain open, continuing to change as the works are handled, repositioned, and perceived by different people. The exhibition brings these traces into relation through the gestures that activate them, asking how materials speak to one another and how making may also bring people into relation.

References
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.