engleski

Commemorating the Deceased along the Balkan Migratory Trail. The Passage between Textile, Needle and Activism

The Passage (2021) is a mobile textile memorial made of handcrafted portraits of the people who died on the Balkan migratory trail in the last several years. Their portraits, embroidered on botanically hand-dyed fabric with red and black thread are made by us, artists, researchers, translators, and other members and supporters of the transnational Women to Women collective based in Zagreb (Croatia) and regional anthropological research project (ERIM). These portraits are grounded in our divergent and multiple long-term efforts to document and denounce border deaths, in our attempts to commemorate the deceased and condemn the violence of the contemporary European border control regime. The Passage brought us together to mourn the dead and pursue an act of commemoration, woven with a simple needle and thread. Our cloth monument raises questions about modes of pro-migrant activist organizing in contemporary context and echoes divergent historical forms and practices, from conflict textiles (Andrä et al. 2019) to grief activism (Stierl 2016). Some of them we will tackle in our presentation, i. e. in our attempt to unpack the making The Passage and to reflect on the process of bringing together different forms of knowledge and experiences, from the clandestine border crossing, legal representation, curating, ethnographic fieldwork, data collecting, sound recording to planting the seeds, fabric dyeing, needlework, writing, storytelling, lecturing etc.

Balkan migratory trail, conflict textiles, counter-memmorialization, border deaths

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