They Said Everything They Couldn’t Say
And You Fell Silent
It was in textiles known as wall coverings (falvédők) that I first discovered the domestic relations of the home, which is the first place we learn to take root, and the different forms of language that evoke and inscribe how one is supposed to live. These wall-protecting textiles spread from Germany to Hungary to the different countries of Europe and the Americas; they are safeguards intended to protect the surfaces of kitchen walls from unwanted stains, soot, and oil.
Caught between the era’s ideological perspectives and its two wars, this practice of needlework offers a written and pictorial history of the elements that shaped domestic gender roles and the duties and behaviours of women. At the same time, needlework and embroidery were seen as leisure activities that occupied women’s desires and aspirations, forging a shared language and memory, relayed between a grandmother, mother, and daughter.
Gözde İlkin. Less me, more us. Embroidery on vintage bundle fabrics, 2021 1 / 3
With sentences like “My greatest happiness and my greatest joy is my silent domestic life” or “She who loves her master cooks well for him” that speak on behalf of women to remind them of their daily responsibilities, these textiles convey these women’s intentions about staying together, coming apart, and falling into disorder. As such, they can be read as personal and collective archives that shine a light into domestic life during the era.
The series They said everything they couldn’t say and you fell silent focuses on the multi-vocal, multi-gendered forms and life-sustaining strategies of plants, which remind us that we are not masters of nature but part of it.
Wild plants displace familiar orders, ideas, and roots; might their modes of resistance serve as guardians to remind human kind of models of behaviour that it has forgotten? These textiles from my family represent the memory of the domestic; as I stitched them, I drew inspiration from the characteristics of invasive plants like Forget-menots, Paulownia, and Artemis Vulgaris, which overtake and transform what belongs to human kind.
Creature
The Father Hidden in the Cellar * The Freeholder’s Our People’s Tales I, 43, 21.L. P. VII, II, 29, 2, 1a
Anna Salmane. Creature sculpture, 2021
In days of old, there once was a land with the following custom: old people, who could no longer earn their crust were slaughtered like old horses, taken off to the forest and disposed of like vermin.
Back in the day, an old man lived on that there land. The man had a son and the son also had a son. The old man’s son began to notice that his father was no longer a full-time worker. It was time for him to depart this world. Having noticed this, the son took his son’s sled, sat his old father down on it and pulled it towards the forest. The son’s son followed in the wake of his sled.
Having pulled his father into the forest, the son turned over the sled and said, “Let him lie here together with the sled!” But his son, a quick-witted lad, said, “No, dad, I’m not leaving my sled here!” “What do you need a paltry sled for?” “If I don’t have a sled, how will I get you out to the forest, when you become old and feeble?”
Upon hearing his son utter these words, the man became thoughtful. “Is it not the case,” he thought to himself, “That my own son is promising me the same end that I am inflicting upon my father? No. This isn’t good!” The son took his father, sat back down on the sled and pulled him back home. But at home the son could not, before everyone’s eyes, keep his feeble father: so he took him and put him in the cellar, where he kept him fed and watered.
After some time, a great famine arose in that same land. Nobody had even a grain of wheat any longer; and very few had even a smidgeon of barley. For a while now, down in the cellar, the grandfather had noticed that things were not good, because his son was only feeding him tiny portions of bread. The grandfather once asked the son, “Why don’t you give me even a hunk of wheat bread anymore?” The son replied, “Throughout the land, there is a great famine; nobody has even got a grain of wheat left, so we’re in great strife, because nobody has got anything to eat or even a fistful to sow in the ground.”
“Hard times,” said the old man; “But listen to what I’ll teach you son, so that you can get enough wheat for seeds. Take the roof off half the barn and thresh the old roof straw anew, and then you’ll see how much grain it still contains.” The son did as his father told him: he took the roof off half the barn, threshed the old roof straw anew and obtained a whole quart of wheat grain.
Having done this, the son returned to his father in the cellar and told him that he’d threshed a whole quart of wheat from the straw from the old barn roof. His father told him, “Take the roof off the other half of the barn and thresh the old roof straw anew, and then you’ll see how much grain it still contains.”
The son did as his father had told him to: he removed the roof from the other half of the barn and threshed the old barn roof’s straw anew and obtained a whole quart of wheat grain. Now his father said, “Now sow wheat!”
The son sowed the wheat and the following summer he produced some really impressive wheat, which provided him with a lot of grain for the following year. Having seen the old man’s son’s wheat, all the folks in the famine-stricken country could not understand where he’d got the wheat from, because nobody else even had a grain of it.
Having heard about this wheat, the squire of the land summoned the grower of the wheat and asked him, “Where did you get a whole field of wheat, when there is not a grain of wheat to be had by anybody throughout the land?” The son paused for thought and, having summoned the requisite courage, told him everything that had occurred as a result of his aged father giving him good advice. But now the squire asked, “Where is your father? We can’t see him.” The son replied, “I’m keeping him in the cellar!”
Suddenly the squire and all the other folks in that land became wiser upon seeing that old folks are also useful – useful for offering good, sound advice. From that time on, people no longer killed their feeble parents anywhere.
Performance
She Sits on a Chair
>> at the Eduarda Smiļģis Theatre Museum
The average life expectancy in Latvia is slightly less than 75 years of age. These years are made up of 27,320 days when we get up in the morning, use the toilet, wash, get dressed, eat and go about our business, only to do it all again in reverse order in the evening. These are monotonous activities that we pay attention to only when, for some reason, it is difficult to perform them.
The performance ‘She Sits on a Chair’ was inspired by the World Health Organisation’s care dependency measure which examines six activities of daily living – bathing, dressing, eating, getting in/out of bed, using the toilet, and walking across a room. A person’s ability to perform these activities is assessed in order to determine whether care is needed.
In the performance, former Latvian National Opera and Riga Operetta Theatre ballet artists perform these everyday activities, turning them into short performances. It is both a celebration of these actions and an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between movement and ageing, which is especially fierce in the world of ballet since a dancer’s career is a relatively short one.
The performance was made in collaboration with choreographer Rūdolfs Gediņš and ballet artists Inese Čača, Maruta Dinga, Dagnija Jaunkalne, Janīna Nurka and Dzidra Treija.
Long after we are death, there will still remain things to do
Dineo Seshee Bopape’s expansive practice deals with socio-political notions of memory, fictional constructions of time, narration and representation as interrelated forms.
She is aware that spiritually and scientifically, what we are seeing as real and solid is not what it is. So, the sense of the mythologies that we create in order to survive as a social species such as linear time, to-dolists, tasks, functions and deadlines are absurd really in their limitedness, yet moving in their beauty as we try to find our place in the world.
Bopape’s de-bordering environments of displacement and re-placement to strengthen our sense of the world on different celestial, earthly, bodily and metaphysical levels. She uses elemental materials such as soil, bricks, timber, with found objects and archival images, video and sound from her everyday, to develop these dense installations intersecting the personal with the collective.
Her contribution to the Survival Kit 12 is the ongoing drawing series Long after we are death, there will still remain things to do that started in 2014. The fact that the series is an ongoing work correlates with its title and acquires a more vulnerable layer with the whole experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The feeling of infinitely continuing tasks that outlast our lifetime, it self makes us question the absurd and obscure ways we create our place in the world as human beings.
