Knitting Statistics

One-year-throws

Knitting the annual statistics of people being killed by someone from the other side in Palestine and Israel.

There are many ways of “getting to know the field” when you are doing research. In the beginning I read a lot. I read social history of The Middle East, statistics and reports, articles, novels and poetry. I searched for scientific papers. I used Google maps trying to get an impression of landscapes, buildings, roads and the seaside. I used # on instagram to get a visual insight of my key concepts through the digital social perspectives: pedagogy, aesthetics, kindergarten, earlychildhood, aestethicexpressions, aestheticutterances, childconvention, palestine, gaza, alkhalil, hebron, occupation. But none of the approaches brought me close enough, whatever that would be. It was nothing but information, and I decided I had to find other ways to entangle information with thinking. I wanted, and even needed to create a closer connection between what was “out there” and what was in me.

In the worldly knitting society a lot of people have been knitting something called Temperature blankets. They pick a specific place, make a colour-chart for different temperatures and knit one row of garter stitch each day with the colour that shows today’s temperature at a specific time of the day. At the end of the year they have a blanket, or a throw, with 365 rows that shows how the temperature differs throughout the year. The knitted throws are traditional throws, but with an aspect of meaning.

Because I am a knitter, I have access to the language of hands, patterns, colours, counting and stitch markers in ways that non-knitters don’t. One evening, sitting in the couch knitting and watching the news, I suddenly figured out what “the other way” could be: I could follow the example of the temperature blankets and knit statistics of something from Palestine. After some dwelling, I chose to knit one-year-throws of the annual statistics of people being killed by someone from the other side in Palestine and Israel. This was in 2019, and as I write this, I have knitted the throws for 2019, 2020 and 2021.

The needles, the yarn, the colors and the stitch-markers, together with information, theory, philosophy and conversations, together with unconscious memories, pre knowhow and expectations, can be defined as “a set of forces that modulate an event” in-the-making or in-the-becoming (Manning & Massumi, 2014). This page will tell stories about some of the relational networks that have occurred throughout the process. Stories that are personal, pedagogical, philosophical and political. Because life, in its transversal existence, always already is interwoven in what has been and what is to come. Never isolated. Always contextualised. Within time, space and matter.

Making a colour chart

After deciding to knit one-year-throws, I began searching for statistics. I tried to imagine what the knitting procedure was going to look like. Me getting up in the morning, opening the laptop, reading the latest update, knitting the number of yesterday. I wanted to find a website showing the statistics on a daily basis, and ended up using a page called Israel-Palestine Timeline. They build their site on the statistics from B’Tselem, a centre for human rights in Israel. They publish pictures and information on the cause of death for people being killed by someone from the other side in Palestine and Israel.

In my knitting log from the 27th of January 2019 I have written the following: If I could get access to concrete information every day, I could make a colour scale where white is “peace”, as in no killings, and black is the colour of a high number. I can feel the urge for white rows. Many white rows. When I read this today, I remember it as a kind of hope for the future pictured in the image of a white throw. Now I know there are no white throws yet. Nor to come in the nearest future, as far as I or anyone else can predict. The colour chart is still needed.

Yarn: Rauma finull
401 – natural white
4115 – light yellow
412 – yellow
450 – dark yellow
4076 – dark mustard yellow
4305 – yellow orange
460 – light rusty orange