Form and Content
43cm x 44cm x 22cm
Description
Three tiered wooden sewing box with legs and handle. Top two tiers lined with boiled wool fabric (Walkloden) in red, grey and black. Bottom tier lined in red velvet. Contains booklet, various objects and mini-textile files.
Close-up view of This is Not a Toy.
Close-up view of Quest
Layout and Contents
Themes, Comments and Storylines
Text of Booklet
Walter Benjamin’s Textile Memories
Retold by Solveigh Goett
August 2007
Based on Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, Suhrkamp Verlag,
Frankfurt am Main 1987
In his first years of exile Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) starts writing memories of his Berlin childhood in an attempt to make bearable the longing for the past, the nostalgia for times of feeling secure and protected which, he fears, are now irrevocably lost.
His aim is not to record the continuity of the accidental personal biography, but to capture images of experiences. In his stories keen observations of the everyday interweave with flights of the imagination that tease out the extraordinary in the ordinary and lead to reflections about the self and the world.
Thus in the crisp creaseless sheet he perceives the comfort of a clear conscience; enveloped in the fabric world of the curtain the child himself becomes transparent, a white breeze of wind, a ghost.
Confined to bed because of a fever he plays with his pillows making them into the mountains he has yet not seen, making caves and exploring their stillness, his voice in the darkness underneath the blankets conjuring up new stories.
Neither the boy when imagining the mountains in his pillows nor the adult when writing down the memory could know that later in life he would have to confront the real mountains to escape persecution and that his life would depend on it. Knowing the end of the story, I sense a foreboding when I read these memories and I am moved by my own sense of loss that is both the same and different.
Benjamin creates in words sensual images beyond the visual. The sound of the tram going past his house and the carpet beating in the yard below his window rock him to sleep. The comfort of his bed and the noise of the big city blend into one image of the private and personal embedded in time and space, society, culture and history and gently moving along with it.
The frail child from a wealthy family, safely tucked up in bed, listening to the rhythm of the carpet beating hears in it the rhythm of the lower classes, of real adulthood, never ending, sometimes slowing down in resignation, then speeding up again as if in expectation of difficulties to come: a sound, he describes as digging deeper into the heart of the child than the voice of a lover.
Such images, Benjamin suggests, may have their own destiny, may be able to project future historical experiences. The telephone, once banned into a dark corner of the corridor between the basket for the dirty linen and the gas meter, is welcomed into the living room. From behind a door the rattling of the sewing machine can be heard on the day the seamstress is visiting: images and sounds of modernity, of urban life, of class difference – textile encounters.
Conflicts and contrasts can be found in such daily encounters with the seemingly mundane, good and evil visualised and sensed in places that are both familiar and strange, within reach and out of bounds.
A corner in his parents’ bedroom behind a faded purple velvet curtain where his mother’s dressing gowns are hanging in a space of impenetrable darkness thus evokes an image of hell, in contrast with the paradise opening up behind the doors of his mother’s linen cupboard where ribbons of embroidered poetry adorn the shelves carrying heavy piles of neatly folded bed and table linen, the air infused with the scent of lavender from bulging silk sachets.
Hell and heaven are thus evoked, images between reality and dream, between day and night where the fairy tale powers from the past, of weaving and spinning, become palpable in everyday encounters with the fabric of the present.
In the fabric of our everyday life, Benjamin’s stories seem to suggest, adventures can be found, mysteries discovered and riddles solved.
The rolled-up socks at the back of his bedroom drawer invite his curiosity, call for investigation. They look and feel like little bags with something inside, a present maybe. But when he puts his hand inside to pull out the ‘present’, the ‘bag’ disappears. He can’t get enough of repeating the astonishing experiment. It makes him realize that form and content, “Hülle und Verhülltes” are the same. It teaches him that truth needs to be teased out of fiction as gently and carefully as the child’s hand pulls the sock out of the ‘bag’.
Thus concepts arise from experience, knowledge from exploration and experiment, from thinking through the hands.
Some objects however guard their secrets, retain their mystery. Such an object is the sewing box, part of his mother’s reign, next to her as she sits with her sewing at the window like Snow-White’s mother, the fairy tale queen.
Sometimes he is ordered into her magic circle, has to stand still while she fixes his suit with a few stitches here and there before taking him out on a visit. He stands motionless, awkward, chewing on the sweaty elastic band of his hat that tastes sour.
In such moments he feels indignant and rebellious, the procedures that he is subjected to seem out of proportion to the promises contained in the sewing box, in the silks of many colours, scissors and needles of all sizes.
The round labels on the cotton reels, gold print on black, intrigue and lure him; the temptation to touch, to put the finger through the label and explore the space underneath the surface becomes irresistible.
The sewing box, he suspects, is not what it seems, not made for sewing, but serving some other purpose, hidden, maybe, among the tangles at the bottom, in the depth of an underground of unravelled threads, fabric scraps, hooks and buttons of strange shapes.
As the evenings grow darker, the children join their mother and take up their own sewing work, following flower patterns with thick woollen thread. Outside, snow is falling. Only the faint crackling sound of the needle piercing the paper breaks the silence.
Occasionally, the boy turns his work over to observe how with every stitch that brings him closer to his goal on the front, the net of stitches on the back gets more tangled.
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