Remediating the Archive: Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Film Quilts as Forms of Material Knowledge

This article argues that the quilting works of Sabrina Gschwandtner, which sew archival 16 mm film strips into complex and colourful visual patterns, offer an understanding of film archives as embodied sites of historical, gendered, knowledge. As cinematic objects, Gschwandtner’s film quilts veer from and expand the conception of cinema as a projected medium, while the artisanal labour of sewing spatializes the process of editing, “lending [it] a concreteness” (Walley 2020, 327). The quilts, I argue, embody a form of archiveology, drawing on “archival material to produce knowledge about how history has been represented and how representations […]  are actually historical in themselves and have anthropological value” (Russell 2018, 22). The historical knowledge of these objects is no longer transmitted didactically and orally (as in the found footage documentaries she uses), but rather through the very materiality of the quilting process. Gschwandtner’s artisanal work mirrors the gendered labour of film editors, while reflecting on the historical significance of quilts as carriers of information transmitted in gendered and racialised circles. I contend that the film quilts are sensory vectors of archival knowledge. While offering crucial considerations on the disregard of American institutions (and archives) towards feminized artisanal labour, Gschwandtner’s work also remediates these archival materials, calling attention to their deterioration as slowly decaying, sensory objects. This remediation allows me to consider archives as sites of sensorial interactions and constantly evolving historical and embodied knowledge.

conceptual framing of archiveology as craftwork powerfully echoes Gschwandtner's commitment to meticulous manual labour deeply entrenched in the history of women's work. For her, craft -whether it be quilt-making, knitting, or film editingis key to the writing of a feminist history of art and media. She writes that "[i]n the era of streaming video, with film on the brink of obsolescence, I drew from the craft of quilting salvaged remnants to create a feminist future for film." 7 Indeed, Gschwandtner's work intervenes at the crossroads of two strands of feminist criticism that flourished in the 1970s and questioned the intersection of "gender, domesticity, and power": the reclaiming of a history of craft as specifically feminine and subversive, and a feminist film theory that challenged patriarchal norms of representation. 8 With the concept of archiveology, Russell intends to "emphasise the documentary value of collecting and compiling fragments of previously filmed material." 9 Documents, for her, are produced by the process of excision and recontextualisation of archival fragments, producing renewed histories and knowledges. One could then further ask what are film quilts documents of, and how does their materiality potentially affect their documentary value as historical objects? To answer these questions, I reflect on Gschwandtner's conscious positioning of her works within a feminist history of women's crafts, and more specifically the gendered and racialised history of quilt-making and its disregard by institutions of the art world. I discuss the way film quilts may evoke a history of feminised labour in the film and media industry. Finally, I consider the materiality of the quilts as sensorial objects, to counter understandings of film archives as disembodied and purely visual. The material display of Gschwandtner's film quilts offer a renewed sensorial experience of the archive, one that acknowledges the copresence of viewer and object. I expand on Baron's definition of archival footage "as a relationship produced between particular elements of a film and the film's viewer," 10 to consider how this relationship might develop within a material, tactile encounter such as those provided by Gschwandtner's film quilts.

Hands at Work (2017): The Gendered and Racialised Legacy of Quilt-Making in America
For her 2017 exhibition Hands at Work at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery (Los Angeles), Gschwandtner displayed a series of film quilts composed of footage from the 1981 documentary film Quilts in Women's Lives. 11 Directed by Pat Ferrero, the film takes part in the wave of feminist artists of the 1960s-80s that fought for the recognition of craftwork as a form of fine art grounded in a specific feminine tradition and legacy. Indeed, the 1960s onward saw a renewal of interest by feminist artists in crafts such as quilt-making, knitting, and macramé, and an attempt to legitimise their place within institutions of the art world and bring attention to centuries of anonymised labour.
Particularly, as Elissa Auther notes, these fibre crafts represented an essential point of access into a genealogy of women's productions, and "an alternative history of art making" that had remained unacknowledged for centuries. 12 Critics worked to recast these crafts away from the sphere of domesticity and anonymity and into the public light, all the while highlighting the contradictions of "seeking recognition in the mainstream art world." 13 Auther adds that "in this context, the once negative associations of fiber or craft with femininity and the home were recast as distinctive and culturally valuable features of an artistic heritage specific to women." 14 Artists like Judy Chicago, Tracey Emin, Joyce Wieland, Faith Ringgold, and Miriam Shapiro among others, reclaimed these crafts in their work, while questioning their association with domesticity. Most famously, Chicago's 1979 installation The Dinner Party subverts the domestic setting of a dinner table by honouring thirty-nine women of significance in Western history, whose names are embroidered along the table runner. Chicago worked in collaboration with artisans specialising in needlework and china painting, acknowledging their names on panels that travelled with the exhibition for the first ten years of its history. Similarly, experimental feminist filmmakers turned to craftwork, like Joyce Wieland in Handtinting (1967-68), where she applies fabric dyes and needle perforations to found footage of a Job Corps documentary where disenfranchised black and white women are educated in typing. 15 Aside from filmmaking, Wieland (in collaboration with needleworkers) also produced textile works such as hanging quilts and cushions that combined traditionally female craftwork with political messages targeting issues of feminism and ecology (as with The Water Quilt, 1970-71). These feminist multimedia works of art participated in the revaluation of craftwork as a form of fine art, with a grounding in women's work.
Among the key feminist texts centring on women's crafts, Patricia Mainardi's 1972 article "Quilts: The Great American Art" is commonly recognised as essential for the recognition of quilt-making as a quintessential American and women's art, and reads as a manifesto against the institutional and ideological division of fine arts and craft: […] although the sexist and racist art world will, if forced, include token artists, they will never allow them to expand the definitions of art, but will include only those whose work can be used to rubber-stamp already established white male art styles. Because our female ancestors' pieced quilts bear a superficial resemblance to the work of contemporary formalist artists […], modern male curators and critics are now capable of "seeing" the art in them. 16 As Mainardi notes, from its origins in the 1660s, needlework was an art for and by women, where they played the roles of "audience and critics." 17 Far from a uniquely domestic and functional use shrouded in anonymity, quilters displayed their crafts publicly in fairs, churches, and grange halls, often signing their quilts and naming their patterns in acts of recognition. Quilting bees (a gettogether for people who sew and quilt, dating back to the eighteenth century) presented women the opportunity to gather in groups (that Mainardi compares to contemporary consciousness-raising groups) and discuss social and political events, as platforms to practice a form of public speech. 18 Pat Ferrero's film Quilts in Women's Lives (1980) follows this commitment to providing a platform to women's crafts by giving a voice to a series of quilters in the form of oral histories. Ferrero films each quilter in frontal shots, without offering an overarching voice to organise their individual experiences. Mirroring the structure of the quilts themselves, interviews are juxtaposed without any apparent order, leaving it to the viewers to form conclusions or "patterns" about the film's message. 19 As Anne R. Kaplan notes, "the choice of the quilters (a black, an immigrant, unmarried sisters, an artist, a schoolteacher, early middle aged and elderly women, and so forth) makes the point that the art of quilting belongs to a great variety of women at different stages of life, who derive different kinds of gratification from it." 20 The film seems to argue that orality is embedded within the fabric and structure of the quilts, as they become mirrors to the socio-economic Mulholland similarly argues that quilts were a "communication genre" as early as the 1700s, through which women could transmit "patterns of speech" intergenerationally in what she terms "language lessons." 21 Gschwandtner's film quilts, while losing the orality of the original documentaries that are sewn together, reproduce this nearly aural quality of the quilts by returning to classical quilt patterns like crazy quilts, diamonds, log cabins, etc. 22 If we follow the rhetoric of Quilts in Women's Lives, through her choice of materials, colours, and patterns, Gschwandtner inscribes a form of subjectivity into her quilts. Her own subjectivity is sewn into the quilts, while at the same time she carries a tradition of quilting that includes the "language" of the women that quilted and recorded these patterns before her. Film quilts take on the grammar of quilting, and apply it to a new medium that allows Gschwandtner to refer back to the voices of the women documented in Quilts in Women's Lives. were given to her after they were de-accessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) following the digitisation their collections in 2009. She adds that "not only had the movies' subject mattermostly that of women creating textilesbeen deemed unworthy of archiving, but some of the film had faded or discolored, adding an additional layer of valuelessness." 24 First deaccessioned from the FIT, then sorted by archivists at Anthology Film Archives, these documentaries emblematise the gendered archival choices that lead to the dismissal of women's craft as well as women's films. 25 This narrative surrounding the rescuing of film from degradation and oblivion is common to the practice of found footage. 26 With the film quilts, this rescue from archival loss takes on a political implication, as Gschwandtner inscribes her work in the legacy of 1980s feminist art and craft historians. In the meantime, she distances herself from sacralising the film prints, by cutting and sewing them, and thus deteriorating their initial conditions. Intervening physically on archival prints through painting, puncturing, scratching, and using chemical solutions marks much of the work of found footage feminist filmmakers, such as Peggy Ahwesh, Cécile Fontaine, Annabel Nicholson, Naomi Uman, and Joyce Wieland among others. These processes enable them to alter the original message of the film and reveal its patriarchal underpinnings. 27 If the film quilts offer a reflection on the gendered division between fine art and craftwork, they do Farrington both note, quilting was never limited to a specific class or race in the United States, and the history of the craft reveals a network of influences between Indigenous, African, and European cultures as early as the 1600s. 29 Enslaved people such as Keckley often crafted numerous quilts for those who claimed ownership over them, frequently with highly creative techniques and styles, and it is through her craft as a seamstress that Keckley gained recognition and her eventual freedom.
Unlike her other quilts from the series Hands at Work, Elizabeth Keckley Diamond works in a quasi-monochromatic manner, setting up a stark contrast between the warm coloured background made of film leaders and the cool-toned diamond shape depicting the quilt-maker. This striking contrast and the structure assemble a powerful portrait of Keckley through an allegory of her craft.
With her film quilt, Gschwandtner pays homage to a key figure of American history and art. " […] in Reel Time, in which the seams were the subject of the work and the construction/destruction of the image was laid bare for all to see, Nicholson reintroduced the labor behind filmmaking, and through sewing bound together the notion of 'women's work' and filmmaking." 38 The invisibility of the labour of film editors, once projected on screen and embodied by Nicholson, can no longer be ignored. With these experimental works, feminist filmmakers and performers recall the anonymised and unacknowledged labour of film editors, a position that women overwhelmingly occupied.
The comparison of film editing to a form of feminised domestic labour dates from the early stages of film production. As Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen notes, editors themselves compared their work to sewing and knitting, as this domestic metaphor "opened these jobs up to women" 39 while also absorbing their labour into the films themselves, essentially rendering their work unnoticed and anonymous. 40 Indeed, performing duties that were considered repetitive and technicalsuch as cutting and pasting negative film togethercontrary to the creative work of male authors, the "cutters" were altogether absent from trade presses and film credits. 41 These tedious and labour intensive jobs fell to young working-class women. As technology advanced, and the studio system evolved in the 1930s and 1940s, working conditions changed for female "cutters." Longer moving pictures and multiple reels made the labour of the editor more visible on screen (as it impacted the narrative more ostensibly). The studio system reacted by segregating the tasks of the editor along gendered lines "film editing split into two subfields: the individual, male-dominated mental artistry of "editing" and the mass feminized handiwork of cutting, splicing, joining, gluing, and lacing." 42 Only very few women rose to prominent positions as recognised film editors, as for example Margaret Booth, who began her career as a cutter for D. W. Griffith. 43 This form of gendered labour falls under what Kylie Jarrett terms "women's work," "the social, reproductive work typically differentiated from productive economics of the industrial workplace." 44 This category offers a critical framework to deconstruct the way that creative domestic worksuch as weaving, sewing, and knittingcame to be constructed as reproductive and anonymised throughout the consolidation of the Hollywood studio system. Through the techniques that she uses, Gschwandtner inserts her work within this feminist critique of film labour, as she writes "for me, what related my work more to 'craft critique' and to feminist traditions was that the labor of the work was being done by me, with needle and thread or yarnthese things that signify what has historically been labelled 'women's work,' just like film editing has been." 45 While reproducing a form of gendered labour with her own body in the fabrication of film quilts, Gschwandtner transcends the reproductive aspect of editing and sewing by calling Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 19 (March 2022) 59 attention to it, and placing it at the centre of her works. 46 Her film quilts condense in material forms the questions of women's work and the appropriation of domestic craft into reproductive labour.
Her work often challenges the anonymity of feminised labour by naming the quilters and filmmakers that she represents and borrows from in her titles (like Elizabeth Keckley Diamond, 2014). The playful movement between the overall object of the quilt, the microscopic observation of the celluloid's images of working craftswomen, and of the quilting technique sewing these images together formulates a critical argument tying together these elements into a feminist discourse.

Film Quilts as Sensory Vectors of Archival Knowledge
As noted above, Russell defines archiveology as self-reflective history-making process drawing from archival materials. The knowledge it produces is both historical and historiographical, reflecting on its own status as a constructed text. So far, I have shown how film quilts can produce a feminist discourse that confronts the structural absence of women's narratives from the history of film and fine arts. While they use images as documents of a specific women's history, the historical knowledge produced by the quilts is no longer transmitted didacticallyas was the case in Ferrero's Quilts in Women's Livesbut through the materiality of the quilting process.
Knowledge becomes embedded in the quilts' stitches, connecting individual stories and techniques.
It is through this alternation between the images and the process of their juxtaposition that Gschwandtner articulates the encounter and interaction of the feminist recovery of crafts like quilting and needlework in the 1960s onward with the contemporary reappraisal of the history of cinema as a one of gendered labour. Through this, Gschwandtner positions her work as part of the legacy of the feminist movement in both the arts and cinema. Particularly, her method of suturing images of craftwork, domesticity, and female community recalls works such as that of Chicago and Wieland, in their construction of a specific feminist history. Archival images become the grammar to articulate this history.
As objects made from cutting and stitching celluloid strips, Gschwandtner's film quilts materialise the practice of archiveology and encourage an embodied relation to archival materials. To understand this interaction between archival images and viewers, I turn to Baron's theorisation of the way found footage formulates this in terms of a relationship. In The Archive Effect (2013), Baron contends that archival images, because of their indexical quality, bring the viewer in "contact" with history. 47 She adds that the archive enters into a relation with the viewer through these film practices: This reformulation of archival footage and other indexical archival documents as a relationship produced between particular elements of a film and the film's viewer allows us to account […] for the ways in which certain documents from the pastwhether found in an official archive, a family basement, or onlinemay be imbued by the viewer with various evidentiary values as they are appropriated and repurposed in new films. 48 Concentrating on the meanings introduced by the confrontation of archival materials to viewers enables Baron to reflect on the multiplicity of interpretative contexts of found footage experiments.
In the case of Gschwandtner's film quilts, these contexts range from educational documentaries aimed towards young audiences and textile students, to feminist audiences engaged in the recognition of women's work. Juxtaposed images, Baron  Furthermore, the film quilts deconstruct the archive as a unified source of historical knowledge.
This archival knowledge, as feminist archival theory demonstrates, is rooted in patriarchal order and can only be dismantled through a scrutiny of its constructedness. 49 As Kate Eichhorn writes: "rather than approach the archive as a site of preservation (a place to house traces of the past), feminist scholars, cultural workers, librarians, and archivists born during and after the rise of the second wave feminist movement are seizing the archive as an apparatus to legitimize new forms of knowledge and cultural production in an economically and politically precarious present." 50 As Russell notes, Walter Benjamin approached the archive as a "construction site," where fragmentation leads to openness and possibility. 51 Found footage, and film quilts in particular, by editing and juxtaposing images from a variety of contexts, break down the seamlessness of the archive, and expose its construction. Fragments from institutional and family archives cohabit to formulate new historical knowledge. Quilts mirror this heterogeneity by juxtaposing squares of different film sources, colours, shapes. Their organisation does not follow a narrative impulse, but, rather, it is grounded in more formal implications that hark back to traditional patterns and a legacy of women's craft. What film quilts emphasise specifically is the materiality of archival images as objects subjected to decay and manipulation. Far from the supposed disembodied knowledge of official archives, the footage of the quilts physically reacts to its interactions with the artist and its viewers. These interactions escape the control of archives and their sanitised environment.
Gschwandtner, for example, does not hesitate to paint over the footage with lithography ink to create more vivid colours over the film leaders. Her film quilts present and encourage a view of the archive as a series of objects connected by the situated voice of the artist, and as subject to interpretation and sensory encounters.
In choosing the archival material to integrate in her quilts, Gschwandtner refuses to follow an archival logic of the perfect print, favouring instead deteriorated prints and incomplete footage.
Her work questions the archival choices leading to the de-accessioning of textile documentaries on women's quilts, in the same vein as Peggy Ahwesh with her short film The Color of Love (1994), where she "rescued" degraded pornographic footage from a dumpster. 52 Ahwesh's film focuses on the graphic patterns emerging from the mould and the leaks, covering the images of two women having sex with each other and a corpse. Both filmmakers emphasise the sensorial engagement with these images and their materiality, calling for an embodied response. If Gschwandtner's quilts do not present the same level of degradation, they similarly reflect on the disregard of archival institutions for women-centred works. Furthermore, film quilts often make use of film leaders, lacking visual images. They sometimes include handwritten notes, or the titles of films, such as the "Discovering Form in Art" in the film quilt Arts and Crafts (2012) that ironically recalls the sudden "discovery" of the formal qualities of quilts by fine arts curators in the 1970s. 53  argue that choosing to hang the quilts over windows in an otherwise empty gallery space crystallised Gschwandtner's reflections on the history of quilt-making and women's work in the film industry. Looking through them provided the viewer with a renewed experience of the cityscape, suddenly filtered through images of crafts and women's hands. The patterns of the quilts overlaid the lines of rooftops, inviting the viewer to step closer and examine the details of the colourful film strips. Casting coloured lights into the gallery itself, film quilts also transcended this space, now imbued with new subjectivities. If (art) history repeatedly ignored and anonymised craftswomen's points of view, these quilts reclaimed them as central in our experience of the city and the art world alike. As Gschwandtner writes, "[t]hey physically engaged the idea of shedding contemporary light on history." 55 Furthermore, this display mechanism accentuated the materiality of the footage, its weight, sutures, and slow deterioration. Both quilts and celluloid film footage are fragile artefacts that require specific exhibitionary and archival treatment due to their materiality. By taking them out of storage boxes and dark rooms, Gschwandtner exposed their fragility as well as the craftwork that goes into making and conserving them. Her art practice transcends the archive while constantly returning to it, exposing its material components and the labour of its workers.
Gschwandtner's more recent workthe Cinema Sanctuary Study seriesreturns more directly to a feminist film history, and the still-unrecognised labour of female cinema pioneers of the late 1800s to early 1900s, such as Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac, and Marion E. Wong. For this new series, she searched archival collections around the world in a methodology that Russell would identify as archiveologyreprinting footage from their films onto 35mm film stock, cutting, and sewing it into entirely black and white quilt patterns. 56 She identifies her practice as a form of quilting, salvaging strips of film and fabric to create new patternsand futuresfor the history of film and craftwork. This echoes Kate Eichhorn's call to consider archival practices as genealogical tactics. In this, Eichhorn follows Wendy Brown's theorisation of "genealogical politics" as an inquiry into the "past of the present" that renders "the categories constitutive of the present" historical and constructed rather than natural. 57 This defamiliarising process, for Eichhorn "is not a turn toward the past but rather an essential way of understanding and imagining other ways to live in the present," and an essential feminist tactic. 58 Gschwandtner's archival workwhether it is centred on female cinema pioneer or the reclaiming of quilting as a feminist artturns to a history of feminist film and artistic tradition to expose the ideology that led to their neglect, and to renew our sensorial interactions with archives in a non-hierarchical, future-oriented process.