Full Description
Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum delves into the history and the changing material culture in Europe through the stories of a basket, a carpet, a waistcoat, a uniform, and a dress. The focus on the objects from the collection of the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin offers an innovative and challenging way of understanding textile culture and museums. The book shows that textiles can be simultaneously used as the material object of research, and as a lens through which we can view museums. In doing so, the book fills a major gap by placing textile knowledge back into the museum.
Each chapter focuses on one object story and can be read individually. Swooping from 19th-century wax figure cabinets, Nazi-era collections, Cold War exhibitions in East and West Berlin, and institutional reshuffling after German unification, it reveals the dramatically changing story of the museum and its collection. Based on research with museum curators, makers and users of the textiles in Italy and Germany, Poland and Romania, the book provides intimate insights into how objects are mobilised to very different social and political effects. It sheds new light on movements across borders, political uses of textiles by fascist and communist regimes, the objects' fall into oblivion, as well as their heritage and tourist afterlives. Addressing this complex museum legacy, the book suggests new pathways to prefigure the future.
Featuring new archival and ethnographic research, evocative examples and images, it is an essential read for students of textile and material culture, museum and curatorial studies as well as anyone interested in history, heritage and craft.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Textiles beyond the folkloric
Fieldwork trajectory
Textural ethnography
The problem of crafting collections
Outline of the book
1. Sample collection: Dreams and archives
Encounter
A place for the museum
Textile archives
World stage
Conclusion
2. Carpets: Knotted histories, recurrent patterns
Nationalist folklore
School and museum
Regained Territories
Post-war reconstruction
Truly Polish craft
Scraps
Recurrent patterns
Conclusion
3. Woven basket: Untethered art
Trader in exotica
Survivors
Waiting
Thread
On demand
Valuing work
Stubborn survival
4. Waistcoat: Colour and Cold War
Language island
Go West
Perforating the Iron Curtain?
Vestige
Conclusion
5. Cook's uniform: Refashioning the social fabric
Renewal
Reorientation
Blue-collar museum
House ghosts
Costume/fashion
Conclusion
Conclusion: From unification to prefiguration
Collection reconceptualized
Other futures
Prefigurative acquisition
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
