what happens on earth, stays on earth
2021, Textile Installation, Silk fabric, embroidery thread, four pieces, 250x90cm, size varies; cotton fabric dyed with coffee and curcuma, three pieces, 400x120 cm each
Collaboration with Sophie Anna Stadler
Photos by Julia Kronberger
Taken as an invitation to be in a dialogue with Academy’s Art Collection and the exhibition Thicket of Ideas - Thicket of Times, me and Sophie decided to work with the evil women characters of the Christian history and apocalypse, that is visualized in Hieronymus Bosch’s famous painting in the collection: The last judgment. Amidst various historiographies of west-based male narratives, the women who dance with serpentiles, witches, Lilith, St. Sebastian as the first queer saint known, various animals of nonconservative body shape are seen as the villain of the (hi-)story: they are seen as evil. We wanted to question, if it is possible to rewrite the stories of this queer-female characters through visual storytelling.
Seeing Federici’s argument on primitive accumulation, that it first took place on exploitation of women and hunting of the witches, we wanted to embrace these key characters of the history, whose self-representation was forbidden. The captions are taken from the book ‘The Hammer of the Witches’. The embroidery is not pointing the outlines of the drawings but rather contoural differences. The characters become abstract, though the delightful smell of coffee and turmeric, the soft touch of silk covering up the room and passage around us.