Interview convo between July Window Artists WARP collective and artist Erik DeLuca

This past Summer WARP Collective did an Installation in the Dirt Palace Storefront Window Gallery.

WARP is a collective studio located in historic Atlantic Mills, Providence, RI. Currently our collective has 8 resident members representing varied interests and disciplines; Nat Brennan, Cybele Collins, Becci Davis, Lu Heintz, Jazzmen Lee Johnson, Jordan Seaberry, Eliza Squibb and Eric Sung. Our studio's infrastructure has an emphasis on pattern, textiles, printmaking and paper works. Our membership represents multiple ages, cultural backgrounds, and genders. We are interested in creating ties across various career stages and practices.

Below is an interview between WARP collective members and artist/educator Erik DeLuca

The Dirt Palance in Olneyville Square with a window installation by WARP Collective. (Photo credit: Dominique Sindayiganza)

The night before I left Providence for Palestine, I drove down Westminster Street, passing Olneyville New York System, until I reached the Dirt Palace Storefront Window Gallery, which was illuminated with the iconic pattern of the keffiyeh. The story goes that during the Arab Revolt in 1936, the British administration of the Palestine Mandate ordered that anyone wearing the keffiyeh was to be marked as opposed to the Zionist mission. This prompted Palestinians to wear the black-and-white headdress en masse. Several days later, after passing through what seemed like endless acres of settlement vineyards and farms on land dispossessed from Palestinians, I arrived in the contentious area of Masafer Yatta on an international law and human rights solidarity delegation. Living feet away from the Israeli settlement of Carmel, we visited the Bedouins of Umm al-Kheir who are battling constant tactics of forced transfer. Later, we drove just a few miles to the village of Sarura to meet with the nonviolent activists, Youth of Sumud that fight back against settler violence daily. Just before sunset, we headed back to occupied Hebron to discuss the AI-controlled machine gun at the Al-Shuhada Street checkpoint. All day, keffiyehs were worn en masse with dignity. On our way back to Bethlehem, we stopped at the Hirbawi Textile Factory—which I hear is Palestine’s only weavery still producing keffiyehs, founded by Yasser Hirbawi in 1961. His son Abdulla greeted us without words and led us to a warehouse full of mechanical looms. He turned them on one by one, with polyrhythms becoming more complex and vibrant. I watched his hands connect with the fabric. That familiar pattern came to form. I bought one. The tag on it read "Made in Palestine." This iteration of the Dirt Palace Storefront Window Gallery features the Providence-based WARP collective. We sat down recently to discuss their installation about the symbolism of the keffiyeh within a network of hands connected in solidarity and learning.

Erik: How does solidarity function for WARP? 

WARP: When we had the opportunity to share work in the Dirt Palace window, we all quickly agreed that we wanted to use this public visibility to make a collective visual statement for a free Palestine while also linking to the funding platform of Operation Olive Branch to support Palestinian families in Gaza. 

As a collective of eight interdisciplinary artists, with very different backgrounds and lived experiences, “solidarity” for us is also the action of maintaining a shared work space that is respectful and inspiring for each of us to practice our art. We support each other by listening deeply and supporting each other as a creative community. We are all multi-faceted people, but a core connection between us is that we process the world visually. Making art can be an avenue towards understanding empathy. For example, one of the prints includes words in Arabic for “Respect + Dignity, Peace, Water + Justice, Human, Life + Freedom.” In order to choose words that could be legibly transformed into each element of the keffiyeh pattern, many Arabic-speaking friends connected to the Middle East advised on this print. In that way, the visual art of the pattern can be a channel to amplify the voices of other people which, for us, creates a form of deep listening.  We would like anyone who encounters the window to know that even if Providence feels geographically distant from the struggle for liberation that is happening in another part of the world, members of WARP collective do not support the current and historical violence against the people of Palestine. As humans, we are all interconnected, and abuses of power and human rights make the world less safe for everyone. 

E: What draws you to the pattern of the keffiyeh?

W: As a collective originally founded around the textile arts and working out of a historical mill building in Olneyville, we often return to textile patterns and techniques as a source of inspiration and metaphor. Our project explores the pattern of the keffiyeh, a scarf that originated among the Bedouin people and that continues to be worn in many arid regions of the Middle East as protection against the sun and sand. The black and white keffiyeh has been viewed as a symbol of Palestinian national identity since the 1950’s and later, as an emblem of Palestinian solidarity. The woven motifs in the keffiyeh represent connections to land, water, and heritage; universal human rights and experiences. 

(Photo credit: Dominique Sindayiganza)

E: Tell us more about your art in the window.

W: Working into the black and white forms, each artist in our collective could imbue the pattern with our own maker-style, visual references, and expression of solidarity. For example, two of the keffiyeh prints include sculptural elements with glazed ceramic sunbirds, the national bird of Palestine, and white paper poppies: native flora and fauna that are symbols of Palestinian indigeneity. This textile-based work, in particular, with paper poppies as the bold stripe across  the bottom, features a hand-drawn net and olive leaf motifs with black ribbon sewn with red thread. Poppies are emblematic of sacrifice and remembrance across multiple cultures. They have added significance to the Palestinian people, their resistance, and connection to the land as one of the national flowers of Palestine and for the fact that, as they exist in nature, they include all three colors of the Palestinian flag.

One print pattern is created from the silhouettes of archaeological objects extracted from Rhode Island’s oldest prison grounds, sharing symbols of persistence and resilience against human suffering. Another print features a portrait from a Reuters photo from Palestine following an Israeli bombardment. In that piece specifically, the fishnet mirrors a chain link fence. Palestinians are fighting ethnic cleansing, where their very existence makes them targets, as the fence that cages them in. All the artworks in the window include a range of techniques including drawing, silkscreen printing, collage, painting, and digital art.  Formally speaking, the use of black and white patterning at large-scale was our technique to increase visual impact as people, our audience, drive through Olneyville Square. There are challenges around visibility and reflecting light when displaying artwork in this particular public gallery space, so we chose to install high contrast prints directly on each pane of glass for legibility.

Detail shots of two prints referenced above with passersby. (Photo credit: Dominique Sindayiganza)

E: What is something unique that WARP learned during this process?

W: We learned that this unifying framework of focusing on patterns to unite all of our styles worked well for us. In collective art making, finding an equilibrium of freedom and individual expression, as well as unity and cohesion is a hard balance to strike. For this project, we all felt solidarity with the dire need to make a statement that Palestine must be free.

Working together feels like a pattern, or model, for collaboration that we will use again in the future. It’s also a nod and continuation of collective works WARP has done in the past. For example, the Repair Shop is a collective performance where in WARP members repair submitted objects and garments while mentoring community participants in their own transformative repair projects. Re means ‘back’ or ‘again’; pair comes from the Latin ‘parare’ meaning ‘to make ready’.  Repair- to make ready again. To be repaired, an item does not need to be maintained in its original state but can move forward into something new. Damage and defects become our points of entry for artistic interventions that reorganize, confuse, enhance, and elevate. Stitches, patches, and dedicated handwork develop new design elements. The textile vocabulary of repair is exaggerated and extended into bizarre, playful and vogue iterations, and in that way, WARP Collective performs Repair Shop as an experimental twist on the logic of repair. Based on our experience creating the keffiyeh prints together, we have gathered some momentum to potentially perform another Repair Shop.  Our solidarity efforts will continue. Some members will expand their window prints into larger projects, while others have participated in Prints for Palestine, a Providence-based artist-organized art auction that raises funds for health workers in Gaza. We each aim to sustain our solidarity efforts to support the fight for liberation, whether as artists, teachers, or visual researchers.

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Erik DeLuca is a site-responsive interdisciplinary artist who focuses on themes of collective remembrance, environmental justice, and dispossession. His work has been supported by Braunschweig University of Art, Kling & Bang, Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, MASS MoCA, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Fieldwork: Marfa, and Montez Press Radio. His writing has appeared in Public Art Dialogue, Mousse, Third Text, The Wire, and Boston Art Review. DeLuca pursued a PhD at the University of Virginia, was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and worked in Myanmar as an Asian Cultural Council Fellow. He has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts, Brown University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Art Education and Contemporary Art Practice at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.