A woven letter. A machine of transmission. A hidden archive.
This installation brings together textile structures, cryptography, migration histories, and women's labor through an imagined correspondence between Mary Burns and Martha Root.
The videos, sounds, and documents presented here reveal some of the hidden layers embedded within the work: names, voices, symbols, codes, and stories woven into the structure.
Ein gewebter Brief. Eine Maschine der Übertragung. Ein verborgenes Archiv.
Diese Installation verbindet textile Strukturen, Kryptografie, Migrationsgeschichten und die Arbeit von Frauen durch einen imaginären Briefwechsel zwischen Mary Burns und Martha Root.
Die hier präsentierten Videos, Klänge und Dokumente machen einige der verborgenen Ebenen der Arbeit sichtbar: Namen, Stimmen, Symbole, Codes und Geschichten, die in die Struktur eingewebt sind.
Une lettre tissée. Une machine de transmission. Une archive cachée.
Cette installation relie structures textiles, cryptographie, histoires migratoires et travail des femmes à travers une correspondance imaginaire entre Mary Burns et Martha Root.
Les vidéos, sons et documents présentés ici révèlent certaines des couches cachées de l'œuvre : noms, voix, symboles, codes et récits tissés dans la structure.
more and more description: Project A explores the relationship.
A woven installation situated between a confessional and a clandestine archive.
The work explores the relationship between textile production, industrial labor, migration, hidden forms of knowledge, and collective memory. The installation draws inspiration from the figure of Mary Burns, an Irish working-class woman whose intimate knowledge of Manchester's workers' districts informed Friedrich Engels' understanding of industrial capitalism. Through a speculative correspondence with Martha Root, a traveler, messenger, and transmitter of ideas, the work imagines a dialogue across time between women whose labor of circulation and transmission often remains unrecorded.
At the center of the installation is a woven letter. Partially visible and partially concealed, the text speaks of unnamed bodies: women, lovers, workers, migrants, and those whose labor, care, resistance, and presence rarely enter official archives.
The project draws upon the principle of steganography: the practice of concealing information within another medium. Like a woven code, the installation contains multiple layers of reading. Texts emerge and disappear within the fabric. Meanings remain partially hidden. Fragments can be deciphered, while others remain inaccessible. In this sense, the work approaches the textile as a form of encryption, recalling the long historical relationship between weaving, information systems, cryptography, and coded communication. The title also references the logic of the Enigma Machine: a message that is never fully revealed, but continually invites interpretation.
Hidden within the woven structure are fragments of women's names inspired by the successive waves of migration that shaped the Ruhr region. These names evoke workers who could have lived, labored, migrated, organized, cared, and built lives within the industrial landscape of the Ruhr across different generations.
Drawn from Polish, Italian, Turkish, Balkan, and German naming traditions, the names reflect the layered histories of movement that accompanied the development of the region's mines, factories, steelworks, and textile industries. They do not refer to specific documented individuals. Instead, they function as traces of collective presence, honoring the countless women whose labor remains largely absent from official records despite being woven into the social and economic fabric of the region.
Like the threads of the installation itself, these names appear only partially. They emerge, disappear, overlap, and resist complete visibility. Some can be recognized. Others remain hidden within the structure, suggesting forms of memory that persist even when archives remain fragmented, incomplete, or silent.
The installation also incorporates an alphabet of struggle developed by the artist. Each symbol originates from a specific place, memory, or experience of resistance: a hidden refuge, a feminist sign, a collective occupation, a site of transmission. Embedded within the textile, these symbols operate as another layer of reading. They are not intended to be fully decoded but rather to suggest alternative forms of knowledge that circulate beneath official histories.
The Ruhr is often remembered through coal mines and steel production, yet the region also possesses a significant textile history. Textile mills, garment production, weaving, and industrial fabric manufacturing formed part of the broader industrial ecosystem.
The textile becomes both archive and infrastructure: a surface capable of carrying stories, names, codes, and hidden forms of knowledge across generations.
Accompanying sounds, recordings, moving images, and documentation extend the installation beyond the woven surface. Voices, fragments of names, industrial resonances, and speculative narratives circulate through the work, forming a shifting network of presences. Like the hidden names embedded within the structure, they appear only temporarily before dissolving again into the larger fabric.
The installation asks how histories survive when they are not officially recorded. How are memories transmitted through gestures, routes, textiles, sounds, and collective practices? What remains when names disappear from archives but persist within structures?
This work is dedicated to those who carried, moved, hid, repaired, transmitted, and remained unnamed.