In this collaborative piece, Amanda Thackray spins rope from paper, using her hands and fingers to roll, twist, and merge the long strands. Milcah Bassel uses her body to explore spatial relationships while providing the leverage and tension necessary to craft a continuous rope. An spoken excerpt from Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” was played through speakers during the performance; the same excerpt was written on the paper used to make the rope. The text is simultaneously embedded and unraveled, an interaction that poses physical, conceptual, and poetic questions of tension and possibility. The performance lies in conversation between the artists’ respective bodies of work and was inspired in part by a visit to the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, where they experienced the collaborative pieces of Janine Antoni, Anna Halprin, and Stephen Petronio.

“Mis-Readings/Drafting a Strand” debuted in October 2016 at the Newark Museum during the Newark Open Doors Arts Festival and was performed twice in December at Venus Knitting Art Space in Brooklyn, NY.