The rhythmic clickety-clack of 19th-century hand looms will soon be silenced when what is thought to be the last Jacquard workshop in Europe closes in a few weeks and another traditional art disappears.
Film makers, theaters and interior designers have been keeping the LAD Jacquard fabric workshop in Warsaw alive but the economic crisis has hit all of them very hard.
“We’re in a very difficult economic situation and in a few weeks this, the oldest working Jacquard manufacturer in Europe, will become history,” said Dariusz Makowski, owner of the workshop.
PHOTO: AFP
Makowski is pessimistic that public subsidies can be found.
Invented by Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard in the French city of Lyon around 1800, the Jacquard loom was the first to weave complicated patterns. It revolutionized textile manufacturing and paved the way for the mechanized modern textile industry.
“It allowed fabrics with beautiful, intricate designs to be produced much faster and at a much lower cost,” Makowski said.
PHOTO: AFP
“In fact in the 1820s it sparked a labor movement by weavers in Lyon, a great social revolution and the rise of the weavers’ Solidarity union in 1823 to 1825 — much, much sooner than in Poland,” he remarked of the rise of Poland’s historic Solidarity union led by Nobel Prize winner Lech Walesa in 1980.
The Jacquard technique spread across Europe in the 1800s and by the 1840s large manufacturing facilities weaving Jacquard fabrics and rare laces were set up in Poland. But soon machine-operated Jacquard looms replaced their hand-operated ancestors.
“In 1926 they [the hand looms] became the property of the Warsaw Fine Arts academy and later the LAD artists’ co-operative was created. We are their successors,” Makowski said.
PHOTO: AFP
“This is the only remaining working cooperative of the famous ones such as Bauhaus in Germany or the Arts and Crafts Society in London,” he said.
Fifteen years ago he bought 12 19th-century wooden Jacquard looms and an inventory of 509 antique Jacquard patterns from the LAD cooperative which folded in post-communist Poland’s difficult adaptation to the market economy.
Today, the workshop is located in a ramshackle greenhouse in Warsaw’s sprawling Royal Lazienki park.
The revolutionary Jacquard loom was the first to use special punch-hole cards using a binary code to make fabric patterns using a steering mechanism on the top of the loom.
“The machine on top of the loom can be likened to a computer while the punch-card is like a kind of primitive computer program or disc,” said veteran weaver Mariola Nowakowska, 54, who has been working on looms for 30 years.
“The machine reads the punch-card and really you could say it’s a kind of a proto-computer,” she said.
A weaver on a Jacquard hand loom must be physically fit to pump its heavy wooden pedal day in, day out and have the patience of a saint to make sure each of several thousand fine threads is in its rightful place, Nowakowska said.
But the effort is rewarded by the special quality of the product.
“On hand looms fabrics are naturally more supple and light than mechanically made ones as we compact the weave by hand and we don’t have as much strength as the motor running a machine,” Nowakowska said.
An experienced weaver can produce up to 2m of Jacquard cloth per day, but Nowakowska is one of the last possessing the skill to deftly operate a Jacquard loom.
“Essentially, this craft has disappeared. We are just two weavers here and young people just aren’t interested in learning. It’s hard, complicated work. Perhaps there will be someone willing to learn, if not, it will become a museum,” Nowakowska said with a hint of sadness.
‘NO SECURITY RISK’: The Railway Bureau reassured the public that the technicians’ activities were limited to technical guidance and did not involve sensitive systems The Railway Bureau yesterday said it had invited eight Chinese technicians to assist with an airport MRT construction project. The bureau issued the confirmation after an Internet user said Chinese nationals had entered the construction zone of Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport’s Terminal 3 project. They asked why “individuals from an enemy state” were allowed access to such a major national infrastructure project, which raised serious concerns over Taiwan’s industrial safety, sensitive systems and information security. The bureau’s Northern Region Engineering Branch Office said subcontractor Taiwan Handle Industrial Co (台灣手把工業) of the Taoyuan airport MRT’s “Contract No. CU05 Project A14 Station Civil, MEP &
The National Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology yesterday showcased its locally developed variants of the Vision 60 robotic patrol dog, which it plans to deploy on the nation’s outlying territories in the South China Sea. The variants were produced under the Joint Lab project — created by the institute and domestic companies — and assembled with domestically produced motors, lenses and artificial intelligence (AI) systems alongside licensed tech from the US, Missile and Rocket Systems Research Division deputy director Jen Kuo-kang (任國光) told the media event at a military base in Taipei’s Dazhi (大直) area. Taiwan has built up its strengths
TIT-FOR-TAT: The US allegedly revoked the visa of a Chinese national working at Xinhua News Agency in the US in response to Beijing’s expulsion of Vivian Wang The Presidential Office yesterday condemned China for expelling a New York Times correspondent from Beijing following the newspaper’s interview with President William Lai (賴清德), saying the move highlighted Beijing’s suppression of press freedom and its threat to international news media. Taiwan has noted a series of recent incidents in which Beijing used similar tactics to “threaten and pressure international media outlets and journalists,” Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo (郭雅慧) said in a statement. “This concerns not only press freedom and freedom of expression, but also the safety of journalists, and Taiwan and relevant partners are paying close attention to the situation,” she
NOT IMMEDIATE: Taiwan has a chance to appeal the proposed 10 percent tariff before it starts, while other countries face a 12.5 percent tariff from the trade office Taiwan is among 60 economies determined by the US to have failed to impose or enforce a ban on the importation of goods produced with forced labor, according to a notice released on Tuesday by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), which proposed imposing an additional 10 percent or more tariff on them. The USTR in a statement said that following an investigation, it had determined under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 that the failure of the 60 economies to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor is
RSS