Nail that Stems / Chapter 1 by Mónica Mays

On Friday, 28 October at 5.30 pm Mónica Mays will be performing Nail that Stems / Chapter 1 alongside her work Extra Irregular Pearls at Her Legs, an Egg, Her Toil(e) and Blankets at Tallinn City Gallery. The exhibition, curated by Keiu Krikmann, looks at material and especially textile as a vessel for fiction and the possible meanings it carries throughout its cycle of life. Evoking the image of a silkworm moth (Bombyx mori), Mays’ performance traces biological, cultural and industrial reproductive mechanisms through a series of texts, voices and poems.

“The labyrinth is a linear architecture – a single, continuous path from entrance to centre, while the maze is more disorienting, featuring branching paths, loops, blind alleys and multiple solutions. Bombyx mori, the silkworm moth, knows how to produce both. Before pupation, the Bombyx mori worm wraps its body up in a single, 900 metre line of silk, slowly turning and winding this thread innumerable times into a layered cocoon, building a labyrinth with a single starting point, and placing itself at the end. However, when the young albino moth is ready to emerge, it secretes an enzyme that dissolves an escape hatch in the silk. This cuts through the single line of thread in a thousand places, turning the labyrinth into a maze of a thousand broken paths, and rendering it nearly worthless for human weaving. In silk textile production, therefore, one must kill the creature at the centre of the labyrinth before it can transform, and then painstakingly unravel its cocoon, retracing the steps of the worm’s complex spirals and unwind it back into a single, continuous line.” – Text by Tom K. Kemp