To make a rope is to give a material strength. Weak strands, entwined together, become strong and resilient, and that strength comes from the material itself. Twisted from offcuts of different fabrics and colours, each rope carries the variety of the factory’s production within a single line. In this way, the ropes offer another way of seeing materials that are usually ignored, recognising the particular character of each fragment as a work in its own right. Rope is also among the earliest materials made by humans, predating the wheel, the axe and, by some accounts, even fire. Its making probably began with the twisting and braiding of grass, as small, fragile elements were gathered and turned into something resilient. One theory links the origins of architecture to this invention: by binding things firmly together, rope greatly widened the ways in which materials could be combined and built with. Ever since, it has served both as an everyday tool and as a symbol in religious and spiritual life. For this reason, the ropes of Entwined Matters are conceived not as a finished product but as a new material. Shapes and uses can follow, as they have throughout the history of rope: sofas, chairs, shoes, bags, scarves, decorations, joints and rituals, to name only a few. Across the world, traditional and contemporary practices show how much can be made from rope, and the forms this material takes next are left to those who work with it. The technique matters as much as the material. By-products are available to anyone, so the methods for working with them should be simple and open to all, rather than dependent on specialised processes. Twisting needs no special tools, or only a simple, inexpensive home-made device to speed it up, and it turns offcuts of any shape into usable rope without cutting or sewing. Because anyone can learn and repeat it, the method has the potential to help the fashion industry deal with its waste on a much wider scale. Entwined Matters was developed over the course of the residency, working directly with offcuts collected from the clothing factory in Valga. The ropes were exhibited in Know the Ropes, installed in the former district office of Valga, a building left empty since a fire in the early 2000s. Each room received its own work, with the ropes answering the walls, openings and remains of the building, so that the exhibition became a dialogue between a ruin and the by-products of the town’s current industry. The textiles were donated by the factory, and the exhibition was produced by PAN- PROJECTS and VARES within the VARES architecture residency programme, part of the main programme of Tartu 2024 European Capital of Culture.