Repetition as Ritual: Art Practices and Knowledge Production

There is a long history of artists and scholars exploring walking not only as a method of transport, but as a generative activity. Like walking, making is a form of thinking, traveling, and giving voice. This paper considers the rhythms of knotting, knitting and weaving as creating room for something beyond the physical object. Within the minute variations in repetitive making emerges a way of articulating a loss of words- a way of accessing spaces where language has slipped beyond our grasp. Drawing on the work of ritual theorist Catherine Bell and performance scholar Peggy Phalen, I argue that the repetition and ritual movement within craft practices creates space for other ways of knowing. Scholar Catherine Bell explains in "Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice" that participants in ritual do not have to necessarily think (or believe) in a ritual to experience transformation because partaking in an action with our bodies forms our minds. In Peggy Phalen’s book "Mourning Sex," Phelan argues for performance’s ability to create transformation for a viewer. Building on this scholarship, I re-examine works by artists Cecilia Vicuña and Doris Salcedo to argue that the knowledges produced in repetitive, ritual making allow us to access what is unsayable.