Weaving Europe, crafting the museum : Textiles, history and ethnography at the museum of European cultures, Berlin / Magdalena Buchczyk.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Buchczyk, Magdalena, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cultural property.

Textile fabrics.

Weaving--Europe.

Weaving.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (225 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.

System Details:

text file HTML

Summary:

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:

Cover

Contents

List of illustrations

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

3 Woven basket: Untethered art

Trader in exotica

Survivors

Waiting

Thread

Weaving on demand

Valuing work

Stubborn survival

4 Waistcoat: Colour and Cold War

Language island

Go West

Perforating the Iron Curtain?

Vestige

5 Cook's uniform: Refashioning the social fabric

Renewal

Reorientation

Blue-collar museum

House ghosts

Costume/fashion

Conclusion: From unification to prefiguration

Collection reimagined

Other futures

Prefigurative collection

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781350226753

1350226750

9781350226760

1350226769

9781350226746

1350226742

OCLC:

1372397874