An Embodied Commons

By Agnese Fanizza

“Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning.”

-Anni Albers, 1965

“Women are […] also the ‘weavers of memory.’”

-Peter Linebaugh, 2017[1]

Abstract:

The acts of weaving, recording, and making are all forms of embodied labor. Across these sustained actions, Naomi Livia produces an intergenerational and ecological archive that foregrounds interaction, introspection, and care. Drawing on feminist and posthuman scholarship by Rosi Braidotti and Silvia Federici, this text examines Livia’s Sunwave~ (2025) and large photo constructions as ongoing, embodied archives of labor, memory, and relational knowledge.

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Naomi Livia positions feminist knowledge making as an ongoing, embodied, and interactive process.[2] This dynamic, “estranges us from the familiar, the intimate, the known and casts external light on it.”[3] For example, in Sunwave~ (2025) Livia interiorizes an entire landscape, making the unknown and unnamed desert almost familiar. Across two 4k video channels, dunes undulate, shift, and echo each other, and the changing landscape mimics the contours of the female body. Through this meditative work, the desert itself becomes a living archive, of a narrated memory, but also the constructing and shifting modes of feminist knowledge. In Rosi Braidotti’s terminology, Sunwave~ would demonstrate a “counter-memory” and an “embedded and embodied genealogy”[4] of not just feminist genealogy, but the desert landscape and its archived, recorded life.

The desert also makes its way into Livia’s large photo constructions such as Primal Radiant Force (2024). Half gelatin silver print and half continuous hand weave, these large-scale works bring together the desert landscape, and the physical labor Livia enacts to weave her response. In this tension, Livia undermines both the authority of the camera and the ideal of the productive, visible worker, exposing each as dependent on processes of care, repetition, and maintenance. She creates and crafts a unifying sense of consciousness: another living archive. Viewing these archives as metabolic systems, as consciousnesses and narratives that grow or rot rather than passively collect,[5] Livia’s craft also embodies the maintenance of the archive. This narrative and history grow as Livia weaves and makes, imprinting the desert environment into our bodies and psyches as we view Livia’s constructions, whether video or thread based.

Indeed, Livia’s practice is an ongoing act of labor, crafting, creating, and maintaining. Throughout her work, the female body, specifically her own, becomes actor, definer, and resister; and as in Silvia Federici’s “commons,” the female body is viewed “on a continuum with the land,” because “both possess historical memory” and are “implicated in liberation.”[6] For Federici, the commons is not a simple concept, but a system founded on social relations and practices, returning to Braidotti’s and Davide Balula’s understanding of the archive as a force of ongoing labor. Therefore, the commons, like Livia’s archives are and must be actively produced and maintained through collective labor, care, and struggle. Federici’s insistence that the commons are not objects but social relations sustained through collective and reproductive labor finds resonance in Livia’s process-based methodologies, which privilege maintenance over production and witnessing over appropriation. In this sense, the work does not monumentalize the site but remains in relation to it, producing a temporal and feminist commons grounded in use, attention, and continuity rather than ownership. Similarly, by rejecting the universalization of knowledge—whether defined as feminist or not—as a colonial legacy, Federici similarly denounces the mechanization of the body, within both slavery and present-day capitalist society.[7] This is especially relevant when thinking through the filming of Sunwave~. The vision of the desert, and its consciousness, provided by Livia is mediated and delivered across a video camera, what Federici would determine a charged device; a “physical infrastructure” overtaking and capturing the creative aspects of living labor.[8] On the other hand, Livia’s weaves are fully embodied acts of personal labor. Rather than relying on the video camera to capture and image, she wraps, pulls, and ties her chosen threads to create these responses. The weaves are nothing without the physicality of Livia’s body and the creative, reproductive labor she enacts.

Livia’s ongoing process presents Federici’s commons as reproductive practice, and weaving becomes a mode of re-commoning Feminist knowledge. Through these material negotiations, Livia constructs an intergenerational and ecological archive. Her work proposes an alternative temporality, shaped by return rather than progress, and by continuity rather than accumulation. In doing so, Naomi Livia articulates a feminist and posthuman approach to making, in which labor becomes a shared, relational process and time itself is reimagined as something sustained rather than produced.

Author Agnese Fanizza is an art historian, curator, and writer working at the intersection of art, architecture, and design. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among other institutions and initiatives across the US, UK, and Italy. She holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University and a First-Class Honors Degree in Art History and Management from the University of St Andrews.