The Serpent’s Thread – PhMuseum

Like a textile containing many threads, “The Serpent’s Thread” serves as a visible retelling of the feminine textile (hello)tales that merge documentation with myth-making, historical past with fiction.

As a baby, I spent numerous hours observing my grandmother, a Polish countryside textile employee, stitching collectively scraps of fabric into objects that have been new, fantastic and delicate. In the identical means a storyteller weaves many components right into a story, her textiles consisted of many threads. Never formally educated to write down attributable to gender politics on the time, her textile works have been her language, carrying a data of generations of girls earlier than me.

Once she handed away, all her textiles, deemed as of no worth, have been discarded or misplaced.

This work emerges from this absence: constructing on the lacking archive, I hint different histories of girls whose textiles communicate the place written data fall silent. Grounded in Saidiya Hartman’s concept of important fabulation, I strategy the archive as a website for each analysis and hypothesis.

“The Serpent’s Thread” weaves the story of my grandmother with the fragmented histories and folklore surrounding the 5 Andersson sisters, who lived in Sweden on the flip of the twentieth century. Their historical past, partly documented and partly mythologised, revolves across the textiles they produced as their elaborate dowries. They have been meant to display a lady’s talent, diligence, and ethical value, representing her worth as a possible future spouse.

Their unconventional lives invited hypothesis and native mythologies. Mirroring my grandmother’s misplaced works, these textiles exist between presence and absence, reality and fiction. Like a woven cloth, the challenge interlaces archival materials, staged imagery, and textile-based photographic interventions to reconstruct layered (hello)tales: of girls makers, rebels, and people whose voices have been ignored, devalued, or erased.