Marinda Vandenheede Belgian, 1976

A retired weaver told me the story this work grew out of. When oil stains appeared on the punch cards, he knew: the loom had to be stopped. Maintenance, inspection, starting over. Not a malfunction that stayed hidden, but a sign that showed itself plainly, right on the card.

In this work I hang a row of punch cards side by side, clipped in place, and apply those stains myself, ink instead of oil, with the same unpredictability with which a real leak would spread. The stain here is not a fault to be corrected, but the signal itself: the moment a system, however exact, shows its own limit and asks for rest.

What strikes me in this story is how self-evident that reading was for someone who worked with it daily. For the weaver, the stain was not a disruption of the system, but part of it, a language he knew as well as he knew the cards themselves. This work tries to hold onto that knowledge: not the stain as accident, but as a sign that, for those who could read it, said as much as the holes themselves. — Marinda Vandenheede