At one level Franz Schmidt’s work is about learning under mobile and distributed conditions. His mobility as an artist is one of post-industrial vagrancy, inventing his practice at the pace of his inquiries into the vestiges of textile industry yet located in Norway. Invention and inquiry are the two faces of his artistic research.

The one (invention) has been focussed on setting up camp inside the industrial facilities of the Woolen Mills at Sjølingstad (near Mandal, in the South of Norway) and Lillehammer (Inland Norway, Gudbrandsdalen). The other (inquiry) has been set on compile cata- logues of textile samples and patterns, on both sites.

Yet, his work at the two woolen mills—Sjølingstad Uldvarefabrik and Gudbrandsdalens Uldvarefabrik—represent two different phases in his artistic research project; indeed, I would say two different artistic modes. In the sense that the two places became sites for an exploration of two different artistic connections to industry.

In one site he would invent his atelier inside the industrial facil- ities at Sjølingstad, and let it merge with this environment to yield the workshop situation he needed for his project. In this phase he also would collect oral history, perfect re-makes of the epochal 727 marine blue fabric, and refine the tailoring of men’s suits from this and other fabrics.

The working habits, ways of knowing, life-style and demeanour impressed on him by the workshop-situation—in combination with his inquiries into the archive—constitues a reflection on the prec- edent of the Arts&Crafts movement; with an approach to artistic research which became rooted in and inspired by dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012.

In this middle phase—when he worked at the Gudbrandsdal’s mode—sought and cultivated a different sort of connection to the mode of production, at the still active woolen mill in Lillehammer. Today, Gudbrandsdalen Uldvarefabrik (GU) lives from sizeable industrial commissions abroad, with Danish Kvadrat as one of its customers.

His GU-mode of association with the textile industry, however, yields a very different output: in this middle-phase of his research fellowship, his experimentation with simplicity in vestimentary forms, elementary textures in material qualities and colour systems, inquiring into the Bauhaus precedent. In this phase, or mode, Franz Schmidt engaged actively in dis- plays and exhibits on arenas where the connection to the art-sphere was at once affirmed, questioned and invented. This holds both of his contribution to the exhibit A Thousand Threads (Lillehammer) and his fashion-display with HAiK in Oslo, both in 2014.

It would be erronous, however, to see these two bents—or, faces—of his work as dichotomous: the one leading, as it were, to Savile Row, the other to the designer’s staging of modern life. Rather, they constitute complementary approaches to the artist’s détournement of industrial mass-production. In my view, Franz Schmidt approach as an artistic research fellow includes archaeological, historical and contemporary layers: in the archaeological layer he acts as an apprentice in anachro- nisms, in the historical layer as a journeyman of art-school tradi- tions, and in the contemporary layer as master in tailoring and a designer of connective citations.