Credits: Letícia Ferreira – Project Manager | Collective work with LabSynthE – Concept Development, Knitting, Installation
An interactive handmade blanket that brings strangers together in refuge.
Two participants sit together under the blanket, wear gloves and touch palms. The glove on one person senses the body of the other, triggering lights woven in the blanket that blink on the rhythm of their pair’s heart beat.
Artist statement by LabSynthE
In community, people find and offer refuge by coming together in common practices such as hugging and holding hands. Sharing an embrace and the space between our bodies co-regulates our embodied reactions, thus cultivating a sense of peace amid stress or fear.
Syntonic Refuge is a social engagement that explores the importance of refuge for survivors and the act of surviving. We find refuge in our community of individuals. People are syntonic, harmoniously responsive to the changing needs of the situation. Through close human interaction, Syntonic Refuge makes visible the heartbeats of two people who wrap themselves in the embrace of a handmade shawl. The shawl represents both care of the individual, and a shelter for shared experience.
Syntonic Refuge asks participants to come closer. Consider our common experience of survivorship, especially on a day in which we are remembering the enormity of human suffering through global atrocities, and share refuge in the heart.
We used one shawl that Dr. Sabrina Starnaman had made before (the purple, blue and green), and collectively knitted a new one (the cream and yellow one).
Pictures by me otherwise noted.
Exhibition History
2021-2022 – Cerimonial Techne, at the Bobst Gallery at the New York University, NY
2019 – Digital Frontiers, Austin, TX
2019 – BEST Symposium, Frisco, TX
2019 – University of Texas at Dallas Holocaust Remembrance Day, School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication (ATEC)
Letícia Ferreira 