je file un fil pour ma fille
Marie Ilse Bourlanges
26 June – 29 June 2025

The Archive Series invites artists, curators, researchers and institutions from the Netherlands and abroad to participate in conversations around the nature of the archive and the impulse to collect information, ideas and materials. Stemming from Looiersgracht 60’s commitment to a dialogue surrounding preservation, the Archive Series comprises unique, site-specific events investigating archives through installation, performance and conversations with artists and practitioners actively engaged in better understanding the past in our present.

For the ninth edition of the Archive Series, Looiersgracht 60 is pleased to present ‘je file un fil pour ma fille’ (I spin a thread for my daughter), a four-day presentation and installation by Amsterdam-based multidisciplinary artist Marie Ilse Bourlanges. Rooted in ecofeminist thought, her research explores relational dynamics and collaborative modes of being, focusing on the parameters within which gestures of care operate. In doing so, she uncovers the delicate tensions and power dynamics that arise as a result, embracing non-linearity to reveal how individual experiences seep into collective resonance. In recent years, Bourlanges has become primarily concerned with textile practices – exploring the performative potential of materials and the tools involved in their processes. Through transient installations and performances, activated by intuitive modes of expression and other narrative elements, she uncovers the latent content within natural materials and historical objects–laying bare the wider socio-ecological frameworks within which they operate.

For the occasion of Archive Event IX, Bourlanges takes as a starting point a video work of the same name, titled ‘je file un fil pour ma fille’. Filmed over the past four years, this audiovisual work brings forth two intergenerational and interspecies relationships parallel to each other, one between herself and her daughter, and the other between a shearer and her sheep—drawing attention to the porous boundaries that sit between gestures of bonding and labour within frameworks of care, as actors navigate dominance, dependence, and mutual recognition. Unfolding through the exhibition space, a tactile installation composed of freshly sheared wool is contained within bales and fastened tightly against Looiersgracht 60’s columns, a gesture referring to ‘childproofing a space’—a parenting ritual that implies preparations for safety and care. The bales, crafted by the artist herself, quietly reference the space’s industrial past. Loosely contained wool, a material historically associated with warmth, care, and inter-species collaboration, points to extractive labour practices and the collapse of Western textile industries, representing the ongoing negotiation of boundaries, value, and the complexities surrounding labor and economic worth. Woven into tightening belts, poetic phrases create tongue twisters using alliterations of the letter ‘f’. Read aloud, these phrases evoke white noise – the first sound we hear in the womb, while paradoxically emphasizing patriarchal constraints embedded in language. During the opening night, the installation becomes the backdrop of a new performance that Bourlanges is currently developing with her daughter.

In a continued thread, Bourlanges revisits Pollinating Agents – Resilient Beings, an essay she developed during her artistic research fellowship at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2019–20). Employing a stream-of-consciousness approach, Bourlanges gives shape to embodied processes of knowledge production, emphasizing the intuitive connections that shape our understanding of the world. Here, alternative models for co-existence and mutual dependency, such as cleaning symbiosis and kiss-feeding, reveal unexpected ways of being with others, which Bourlanges connects to her relationship with her daughter – exploring the complex and conflicting experiences of motherhood. 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?

Echoing Looiersgracht 60’s past as a printing plant and cardboard factory, Bourlanges synthesizes her essay into thoughtfully crafted booklets, titled ‘Thread-like growth on animated beings’. 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 will be available for purchase, alongside a curated selection of titles hand-picked by Bourlanges.

Public Programme

Opening Performance ‘je file un fil pour ma fille’

Wednesday 25 June at 19:00

Join us for the opening night of je file un fil pour ma fille on Wednesday, 25 June 2025 at 19:00, as the installation becomes the backdrop of a new performance between Marie Ilse Bourlanges and her daughter, developed especially for the occasion of Archive Event IX. Moving intuitively throughout the space, the duo will performatively engage with the installation, using hybrid tools and reconfigured objects crafted by Bourlanges herself – unravelling the layered dynamics embedded in both wool and maternal practices, and their broader socio-ecological entanglements.

Artist Talk & Finissage: Collaborative Processes in Artistic Production

Sunday 29 June at 16:00

For the closing event of Archive Event IX Looiersgracht 60 is pleased to welcome Amsterdam-based artist, writer and performer Giulia Damiani, composer and collaborator for the opening performance of ‘je file un fil pour ma fille’ in conversation with Marie Ilse Bourlanges. The two will engage in a reflective discussion, sharing insights on collaborative modes within artistic production and the processes involved in realising this work, the quiet role of intimacy in performance as a conduit for connection, and how these threads inform Bourlanges’ broader artistic trajectory. In connection to Damiani’s research and practice, they will delve into the layered entanglements of performance, ritual and rurality, and how performative practices can reconfigure ritual forms of knowledge-sharing between human and more-than-human agents.

Admission is free, but seating is limited. To RSVP for the opening please email us at info@looiersgracht60.org.

The installation is open to the public from Thursday June 26 – Sunday June 29, between 12:00-20:00.