»STITCHPUNK: INFUSED« explores labour as a form of knowledge, which is an overlooked resource in conversations about sustainability.
Li Actuallee
Photos: Katharina Ley
Developed by Li Actuallee during their SBYD Textile Residency, STITCHPUNK: INFUSED explores labour as a form of knowledge, which is an overlooked resource in conversations about sustainability. Although environmental narratives emphasise materials, they rarely acknowledge the bodies that gather, spin, dye, stitch and transport them. Li Actuallee’s work reveals this invisible labour.
Using crochet and knitting techniques, as well as hand-built tools that deposit charcoal, pastel or ink, the textiles become records of gesture, fatigue, rhythm and interruption. Each mark is a trace of the body in time. The works unfold in ‚craft time‘: slow, non-linear and resistant to productivity norms. They are shaped by rest, repetition and emotional endurance.
Drawing on Marx‘s writings about alienated labour and contemporary critiques of craft economies, the project reflects on how craft workers today must commodify both their identity and their time. By combining soft textile techniques with pigments that reference industrial labour, the work challenges the boundaries between ‚hard‘ and ‚soft‘, manual and emotional, and personal and political.
Stitchpunk insists that labour remains visible – stained,
marked and embodied. The work was presented at Museum Folkwang.
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This residency was part of SBYD, through which Folkwang University awards grants to international artists and designers invited to Essen to realise their own projects on site. In 2025, the programme’s third round was announced in India. In collaboration with Museum Folkwang and the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore.
