Katoenopolis, 2024

Katoenopolis is a film and live performance made with the poet Mark Coverdale for the reopening of the Sickhoes, the video space in the garden of Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede. Its title, from the Dutch katoen (cotton), points to Enschede’s history as a centre of the cotton and textile industry.

The work premiered at RMTnext, the museum’s evening programme, on 25 April 2024. Douglas and Coverdale performed live alongside the screening, in two fifteen-minute performances at 19:30 and 20:30.

During each performance a ball of wool was passed through the audience, and each person looped it twice around a finger before handing it on, so that the room was gradually bound together by a single thread. The action is a homage to Alison Knowles, whose Fluxus score String Piece (Variation on Braid) (1964) has the audience tied up, and Knowles is also named in the work’s verse.

Douglas and Coverdale are both from the North of England; Coverdale is from Oldham, one of the cotton towns around Manchester. He brought the wool with him from Manchester to Enschede, so that the thread passed through the audience physically joined the two places. Their histories run in parallel: Twente’s cotton industry was established in the nineteenth century with English expertise, and in both regions the mills that had employed most of the working population closed in the decades after the Second World War. Looped from hand to hand, the thread reconnects two cotton cities and the people whose labour built them.