What can textiles – coarse cloth or fine silks, work and household linen, clothes in different styles and fashions – tell us about different forms of dependency: enslavement, serfdom, forced labour, or in our own day, factory work in the Global South? How do social, economic, religious and power-political hierarchies and the dependencies they produce, and the resistance that dependencies in their turn generate, tie in with the production, distribution and the use of textiles? What types of dependency underlie the global trade routes and commodity chains for textiles and their raw materials? And why are researchers from different fields – including archaeology, history, culture studies, art history, and literary and religious studies – currently engaged in investigating such questions at the University of Bonn?
The digital exhibition “Enmeshed and Entwined: Fabrics of Dependency” explores these and other questions from different perspectives in the style of a quilted narrative. The result of transposing a literary stylistic device – storytelling – to the medium ‘exhibition’ is a multimedia quilted narrative. This stylistic device was developed by African-American women writers, especially Alice Walker. It is based on a textile technique by which many different patches, such as cut up old clothes or cut-offs from larger pieces, are stitched together in three layers into one large piece. The different patches it was made of not only combined into artistic patterns, but also represented individual people and/or events from their lives, showing up the links between the exhibits and the themes that they represent.
Visitors to the exhibition can learn about the connection between clothing and social groups in ancient Greece, for example, or between the dirndl and transatlantic slavery in the early modern period. Thanks to a collaboration with the Bonn Centre for Digital Humanities, they can also use augmented reality stations to gain a deeper insight into the forced labor conditions of indigo production on colonial plantations in the Caribbean.
The exhibition can be seen until 20 December in the reading room of the main library of the ULB, Adenauerallee 39-41. Admission is free.
The exhibition is a cooperation between the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, the Bonn Center for Digital Humanities and the University and State Library Bonn of the University of Bonn.
The Cluster of Excellence Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies
“Asymmetrical dependency” – with this new key concept, the Cluster of Excellence Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) offers a new approach to slavery and dependency studies. All forms of profound social dependencies such as slavery, serfdom, debt bondage and other forms of permanent dependencies are investigated. The concept is open to all epochs, regions and cultures as well as all shades between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’. With its expanded perspective, the Cluster of Excellence opens up the realm of dependency research to new transcultural perspectives and comparisons.
