tional success. Clothes also contain other energies, yet we often neglect them only
to focus on their relation to the fashionable image. Through Barthes’ argument, I
instead proposed to preserve some of these signs of life on the garments, the mem-
ories we want to treasure. Instead of washing some memory-marked stains away
and send their physical mark on us into oblivion or anonymity the punctum ma-
noeuvre is the highlighting of these wounds. By embroidering the contours of the
stain and manifesting their meanings onto our second skin, they become monu-
ments to our own lives, secret signs of passed times. Like the punctum of Barthes,
they are also personal, only understood by those taking part in close relationship
with the life of the wearer. A new dimension is incorporated into the garment, as
with a ritual tattoo or a scar. The kit consisted of this essay and at the back of the
booklet red thread and an embroidery needle was added. These were the tools
needed for getting started.
Another of the kits was the Read/Write Jewelry. This kit also consisted of a short
essay but also included an updated safety-pin. The safety-pin was equipped with
an attached 30cm long silver thread. With this the wearer could write his own mes-
sage as an integrated part of the jewelry. This was an update of the punk’s subver-
sive safety-pin, but with the ability to “write back”, to make one’s own message out
of it, and not accept the jewelry as a preconditioned entity already saturated by
meaning. The essay juxtaposed official writing reforms in Turkey and Sweden with
the subversive “writing” of the punks’ use of this domestic tool as jewelry. Today,
the safety-pin is once again a domestic item, deprived of its subversive meaning,The Read/Write Jewelry was initially a kit
made for the design biennial in Istanbul 2006.
It compares the official writing reforms in Turkey
and Sweden with the “misuse” of the safety-pin by
the punks as a form of iconic subversive writing.
The Turkish and Swedish writing reforms were
instigated from above with varying results. On the
contrary the safety-pin misuse emerged as a symbol
from the streets, but it soon became a common type
of subcultural writing. They were a type of poach-
ing of its time, but the safety-pin did not offer much
possibility for altering the message set outside of its
context.
However, in recent times it has been possible to trace
a change in modus operandi of writing doctrines in
society; from RO to R/W. That is from Read Only
to Read/Write. This involves a shift from standard-
ized, interpassive consumption of mass produced
goods, with limited possibility for user engagement, toRead Only Jewelry
Read/Write Jewelry
a fluid network and method-based society offering us-
ers a wider possibility to “talk back”. With R/W,
there is now a possibility of talking back, to create a
personal massage, in fact to be nothing less than the
media itself. Every message might not be a specifi-
cally unique, but it can still make an impression and
even assemble something so far unseen or unknown!
And it is yours.
With the R/W jewelry you can write as you wish,
invent a symbol, change the wire, add something to it,
throw it out of the window, for this piece of jewellery
is not an item in itself, it is an idea. An idea is
similarly an action space in which you can find your
own voice and practice or where a dreamed image can
materialize.
If you are given the sheet of lined paper ignore the
lines and write on the diagonal! It is not a matter of
how many colour crayons you have in your box, but
about what you do with them. Now start colouring
outside the lines!
Read/Write!