Charlotte Johannesson trained as a weaver in the 1960s. During the same period, she established in Malmö her studio Cannabis, named after the hemp plant from which she derived the fibres for her works, and with clear connotations to the favourite drug of the Sixties’ counterculture. Johannesson began practicing textile craft as art to address socio-political injustices. In 1978 she started merging weaving with early computer technology when she traded a tapestry for an Apple II, one of the first mass-produced personal computers, and applied the translatability of the vertical and horizontal lines of the loom to the language of computer programming. Johannesson’s fascination for the early “micro- computers,” as they were called back then, often appears as the subject of her work: the plotter print Computer Mind (1981–1986) depicts a figure connected to a computer via her nervous system. Since the 1980s, a number of Johannesson’s works have included images of world maps and of Earth seen from space, paired with slogans taken from popular culture, such as in the Take Me To Another World (1981–1986 and 2019) and The Target Is Destroyed (2019). Merging traditional weaving techniques with the experimental investigation of early computer technology, Johannesson continues to reinvent her practice to explore the possibilities for social and cultural change.
Liv Cuniberti
