The Curtain of the Sky

2021, curtain, sound

This projet was commissioned for the Borås Biennial.      We circulated a call-out through the Borås Art Museum to ask residents to donate their blues, old items of blue clothing: denim, work-shirts, dresses, and T-shirts. The blue was a play on the title (The Curtain of the Sky), as well as a mechanism to place all the fabrics on an equal plane. These fabrics were stitched together in a patchwork grid to form one side of the curtain, while the other was made up of long vertical strips of new fabric.

I was interested in the fact that Borås was often referred to as the textile capital of the Nordic region. All aspects of production, from colouring to sewing, were historically carried out in the city. It was a major employer and became a hub for new immigrants, before it suffered economic collapse in the late 1980s. A lot of companies remain based there, but they have outsourced most of their labour.   A lasting legacy of the industry is the contamination of the River Viskan, which runs through city centre. It is poisoned by the waste pollution from chemicals used in manufacturing and processing textiles. We chose to instal the curtain on a footbridge over the river, which leads to the central park.

We worked with a group from the Textile Hub adult education class, made up of new immigrants from Indonesia, Syria, Iraq, Albania, and Venezuela, taught by the wonderful Eva Warberg, a local garment designer. The class served as a kind of skills training exercise to help people gain experience for employment in the fabric industry. 

In the research phase of the project, I was looking into Fanon's seminal text Black Skin, White Masks, framing current immigration issues within Fanon’s. It helped me think about how a lot of these issues are historically intertwined in the textile industry. The location of the work was chosen to expose this context, in tandem with the soundtrack accompaniment which contained three poems by Athena Farrokhzad, Adrian Perera, and Iman Mohammed about immigrant family history, fabric, labour, and the environment, all interspersed with snippets of symphonic, operatic, and ambient compositions by Kajsa Lingred, Cassius Lambert, Alya Al-Sultani, and Paul Purgas.

Within a few days of the official opening, the curtain was completely destroyed by arson. It was a weekend of melee across Sweden with two artworks from the Biennial destroyed. After discussion with the collaborators at the textile hub, to try and process the trauma of that violence, we decided that perhaps a signifier could be put up to commemorate the tragedy and be used to generate discourse. We ended up digitally printing a new curtain with a blurred image of the original design, and hung it on the charred truss that remained, with the sound works reinstalled.