都市を編み直す｜Knitting the City Anew / Jan 23 – Mar 14, 2026

Knitting the City Anew is a research-based project by TALK NONSENSE, drawing on Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1980)—particularly his ideas of "strategy" and "tactics," and "Walking in the City." Composed of three practices unfolding across three months, the project was presented as a program at YAU (Yurakucho Art Urbanism), an art-based platform for innovation based in Yurakucho, Tokyo. It opened our ongoing inquiries and attitudes into a more public form.

Just as Certeau located the makers of the city not in its planners but in the daily practices of those who inhabit it, we treated each visitor's gestures as small acts of knitting the city anew. Knitting, unraveling, and remaking—what emerged through these acts, the very relations they generated, became the subject of the project.

* Reference: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Trans. Toyoko Yamada / Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 2001).

1. Knitting as faire avec

We revisited wartime knitting through Certeau's idea of everyday practice—faire avec, "making do." Not an explicit resistance to order, but a quiet practice of working with what is at hand, even while caught up within it.

2. Archive as Translation

Our research project Knits & Review archives old knitting patterns as cues for rethinking today's relations between production and consumption. Eight wartime knitting patterns were translated into forms knittable with currently available yarn and tools, and presented as part of the exhibition.

3. The COPYROOM as a Device

A copy machine was installed in the venue, allowing visitors to freely print and take home both the original patterns and our translations—opened for a limited time as a "COPYROOM." Rather than viewing and leaving, visitors printed and carried something away. That reversal itself became a gesture of faire avec.

4. A Quiet Link to "Art Deco and Fashion"

We attempted a loose connection with "Art Deco and Fashion," an exhibition running concurrently in the same venue. By moving between the two rooms, visitors could wander into another history of clothing—different in its making, different in its origin—as if straying off course.

5. Talk Program

During the exhibition, on Saturday, January 24, 14:00–16:00, we held a talk program titled Fashion as an Everyday Practice — Certeau, the City, and Knitting. Facilitators: Junpei Mori (YAU / architect), Sen Isozumi (Assistant Curator, The Kyoto Costume Institute), and Shingo Kokaji (TALK NONSENSE).

1. U-A-R-K as a "Small Tactic"

We introduced U-A-R-K (Unravel and Re-knit), an experimental workshop that takes apart existing sweaters and knits them again. Through this cyclical act—an experiment in autonomous sourcing—we faced the origins of materials and considered new relations between clothing production and its users, framing it as one of "our small tactics" carried out from outside the vast supply network.

2. A Quiet Discomfort with the Systematization of "Circularity"

The recent acceleration of circular design in the fashion industry is being driven by institutions and technology. Yet as it becomes systematized into new standards and values, it tends to be reabsorbed into large-scale frameworks of production and distribution. The more "circularity" is spoken of as an ideal, the more abstract the practice becomes—growing distant from the tactile, choice-by-choice sense of wearing and selecting clothes. We feel a quiet rupture between the act of enjoying clothes and the systems that surround it.

3. Toward a Practice That Holds Doubt and Hesitation

From Certeau's perspective, people's practices are not unilaterally determined by institutions or design. Within given frameworks, people judge, choose, sometimes leave things unsaid, and find their own ways of using and reusing their relations to objects and environments. Rather than aiming to "make people understand correctly," we wanted to actually place ourselves within situations that include judgment and hesitation—and to share that very experience with participants.

4. Designer and Practitioner at the Same Time

We are the designers of this workshop, and at the same time we stand within its practice. To carry experiences full of doubt and decision-making forward, without separating them from the design itself. This is not a project with a clear visible goal, but the products that emerged from it, along with their making, were presented in the venue.

1. Cap Scarf — Examining a Minimal Structure

Building on the wartime patterns introduced in Practice I 〈Knits & Review / COPYROOM〉, we held a workshop to re-examine their structure. The "Cap Scarf"—a 1910s British hybrid of cap and scarf—was built with the bare minimum of structure, and remains a precious example of how garment design takes shape under limited conditions. Before knitting, participants took part in a design exercise called "Three Tubes," experiencing its simplicity and adaptability, and exploring new forms together with us.

2. Knitting Bee — From a Private Act to a Public Situation

Following the "Knitting Bee" held in New York's Central Park in 1918, we made things in a public space where people pass through. As with the Knitting Bee of that era, this was an attempt to shift making from a private act into a public situation. Bringing the body into public space, slipping something else into the rhythm of the planned city—we quietly learn from this lineage of practice.

* Reference: Genpei Akasegawa, Tokyo Mixer Project — Records of Hi-Red Center's Direct Actions (Chikuma Bunko, 1994).

In 1964, on the streets of Ginza on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, the Hi-Red Center wore white coats and polished the road—that direct action—we follow, in our own small way, this lineage.

3. Knitting in the Street — A Slight Shift from "Walking in the City"

The point of contact was Yurakucho, an unfinished city in the midst of urban development. We took our knitting needles into the streets. Layering ourselves onto Certeau's "Walking in the City"—but instead of walking, stopping to knit. Instead of passing through, lingering. Within a city being smoothed by planning, what difference can a small act of knitting introduce into the city's rhythm? With this question, we placed the sound of knitting needles on the street.

4. The State of Making, Exposed—and Its Slowness

The exposed state of making—and the fact that this making was something slow, set apart from industrialism—became, we believe, a moment for re-knitting today's urban things. To weave another time into the heart of a vast city like Yurakucho, being arranged for speed. That, too, was a single gesture running through all three practices.