Birgit Szepanski (Germany)

BIO//

Birgit focuses on the culture of remembrance, women’s stories, clothing and photos as carriers of memory. One thing that unites her work: the place. In the process of researching places, she creates a series of works that resemble an ensemble of possibilities or layers of a place. For her, the city, places and time are diverse, interwoven structures.

Walking through the city, feeling how she perceives urban space as a female flâneur, going into archives and researching what happened in the past, writing about it and finding artistic forms. A variety of relationships emerge between my textile objects, installations, artist’s notebooks, texts, photos and archive photos.

PROJECT//

An island in the river, a waterfall, bundles of cotton threads and bales of fabric, millions of threads in looms, the exploitation of people and nature, uprisings and strikes by workers who fought for the little freedom they had. Somewhere in this flow of images: The life and work of Amalie Kreisberg – a textile worker, who went on strike for better working conditions in 1905 and died in prison one year later – is also embedded. Is it gently or burstingly, rustlingly or quietly connected to the places? Birgit would like to find images for this, document these traces and associations and share them with others in a walk: On Traces with Amalie Kreisberg. A Research with Walks and Textiles.