Hate Speech in Threads: Stitching and Posting a Resistance in the Tiny Pricks Project

Abstract

Hate Speech in Threads: Stitching and Posting a Resistance in the Tiny Pricks Project Malaika Sutter (bio) On February 24, 2020, President Donald J. Trump tweeted the following: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”1 The first sentence of this tweet was then shortly after reposted on the Instagram account @tinypricksproject, this time in red thread on a blue and white surgical mask worn by an elderly person (figure 1).2 The tweet is stitched on a mask, an object that has become indispensable since the COVID-19 pandemic, that acts as a textile canvas. The stitched words reach deep into the mask, thus rendering the object useless, an act akin to the words of Trump, who insisted that the virus will disappear “like a miracle.”3 The piece is part of the Tiny Pricks Project, created and curated by artist and activist Diana Weymar.4 Initially the project’s aim was to collect as many stitched Trump quotes as possible by the next presidential election in 2020, but the project has become larger, extending to other topics “with over 3600 Tiny Pricks and over a thousand participants globally.”5 It started on January 8, 2018, when Weymar stitched her first piece, an excerpt from Trump’s [End Page 170] tweet from January 6, 2018.6 “I am a very stable genius” is embroidered in yellow thread on top of a brown cloth displaying an embroidered bouquet of flowers, a needlework piece made by Weymar’s grandmother in the 1960s.7 Weymar collects, curates, and exhibits artworks made by herself and other artists from all over the world.8 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Diana Weymar, “This Is a You Problem,” Instagram photo, February 25, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/B8_sZoInLuv/. The quotes alongside ornamental images are carefully stitched on selected fabrics. The statements often feature tweets; thus, the digital form becomes a tactile form. Weymar then photographs the textile artworks and creates a post on her Instagram account, rendering the tactile form digital again. Sometimes the artworks are photographed in a particular setting or in a particular assemblage in which other objects enhance the embroidery’s statement or give it a different twist. Although the tactile is digitalized, the tactility nevertheless persists through the audience’s “immersion” that triggers memories of haptic experiences.9 Posting the artworks also [End Page 171] means that they are now more widely accessible. People can like and comment on them with words and emojis, tag friends, follow the individual artists, be inspired, and create new embroideries. The project is thus in this sense cyclic and creates both a material and a digital archive. While the project has received considerable media attention from the New Yorker, Vogue, and Financial Times, among other periodicals, it has not yet been explored in detail in a scholarly context.10 It is the aim of this essay to show the project’s potential as a primary source that opens up topical and crucial questions on new digital forms of resistance. Resistance is here understood as a critical engagement with Trump’s sexist and racist tweets, rendering them visible and tangible, and as an act of talking back through needlework and Instagram. Trump’s use of Twitter was unprecedented for a president and before that as a presidential candidate. Unsurprisingly, his tweets engendered new forms of resistance such as the Tiny Pricks Project. This essay takes a closer look at two artworks that creatively engage with two of his tweets in order to shed light on the different modus operandi of the project. One piece elicits resistance through its embroidered forms, using text, image, and textile as a means to expose and counter this hate speech and to make visible a community of resisters. The other piece concentrates on the photographed objects in connection to the needlework and engenders resistance through the layers of irony in the different media. Art historian Janet Berlo notes that the mobilization of needlework for political...