CANVAS ENCOUNTERS - ENCOUNTERS IN CANVAS
Alissa, the child of Syrian asylum seekers, makes a long journey from home to find her parents in Sweden, mostly alone as an unaccompanied minor, on the streets of Europe. On the road and in the camps, the heroine of the story learns about life and continues the craft of sewing and embroidery that her grandmother taught her before she was forced to leave her to continue on her own. Always on the move, she continues learning a multitude of techniques from different parts of Europe. She is helped in her efforts by people who recognise her talent and skills and provide her with opportunities. In the midst of her loneliness, her suffering and the endless waiting, these tolerant, friendly and sometimes knowledgeable persons emerge in different settings, taking her by the hand and guiding her further down the road at various critical junctures. Eventually, she reaches her parents and goes to a normal school for the first time.
The Encounters on Canvas exhibition is inspired by Alissa’s journeyings along the roads and through the countries of Europe, undertaking a similarly multifaceted journey through textiles. It presents the intertwining of fabrics and modes of dress from across Europe and further afield, in relation to timely historical and cross-cultural issues such as the mythical origins of weaving, the transformation of a domestic occupation into wage labour, the breadth and power of the phenomenon of dress, that reveals yet conceals everything to do with human personality. In each of these instances, central reference will be made to the importance of migrants, of humanity on the move, in the diffusion and the intertwining of raw materials, techniques and modes of dress from neighbouring or distant countries and in the advent of both heritage and the material and immaterial shaping of our everyday.
Eight-year-old Alissa was an unaccompanied minor refugee. Her parents had fled to Europe from war-torn Syria leaving her behind, still almost a baby, with her grandmother Amina in Homs. A few years later, Amina decided to emigrate with the child, to be reunited with her parents in Sweden. It was a difficult decision, because she was an old woman and the child was just eight years old. The journey was hard and slow. The streets were full of cars and people trying to keep moving by every means possible, on motorbikes and in carts, and their bus made difficult progress. Totally at a loss, Amina started by going back to the road she already knew, she visited two convents, in Saidnaya and Maaloula, where her educated parents had sent her as a teenager to learn French, sewing and embroidery. They stayed there for a time, waiting for the right conditions to cross from Tartus, the great port of southern Syria, to Cyprus and from there to mainland Europe. Amina was delighted to rediscover in the convents all that she had learned in her youth, embroidery, sewing and lacework. The nuns also gave her many materials, thread, needles, yarn, dyes and a small colour booklet with instructions and designs for various embroidery stitches.
During months of compulsory waiting, she taught Alissa the principles of sewing and some embroidery. There had been many violent incidents outside the port of Tartus, and ships full of refugees had sunk. The grandmother stifled her worries and worked tirelessly with her granddaughter. They tried out new designs and stitches, and she kept Alissa busy by having her embroider systematically, based on the instructions and patterns in the booklet. They compared, matched and executed all they knew with cheerful patience. The grandmother could not know that her granddaughter, on the distant roads of Europe which she was to travel alone in a few months’ time, would be the unwitting bearer of the very European skills she was tirelessly teaching her, skills which had largely been abandoned due to mechanisation and cheaper imports. Alissa learned by playing: she made little houses and kittens with needle and thread, and sewed little skirts on the rag doll her grandmother had made for her.
The ultimate trial awaited them in Tartus, where they had to part. The grandmother made the difficult decision to stay behind and send Alissa to make her way to Sweden alone, as an unaccompanied child refugee. The little girl could continue the journey, illegally but with some leniency from the authorities, but the grandmother could not. So Amina entrusted her to an organisation accompanying children to Cyprus, and soon Alissa crossed the sea and found herself on the island.
After that, the child’s life was spent with groups of unaccompanied minors, a temporary life constantly on the move, although it lasted almost two years. The composition of the groups changed constantly as people came and went, as did the legal framework. But everyone in Cyprus was very nice to her, and she spent many hours sewing and embroidering, to remember her grandmother by, although no one understood how she did it or why. They did, however, give her a real doll to sew clothes for. Red Cross volunteers visited the camp, organising activities and teaching languages and other things. They were thrilled by Alissa’s skills and brought her yarn and embroidery fabric, praised her and took her to professional craftswomen to learn from them. But she cried herself to sleep every night, softly so no one could hear her.
Alissa later found herself in Patras and then in Piraeus, in a hostel for minors. I met her at a craft fair organised by various bodies as a festival for unaccompanied children. The idea was for them to show possible foster parents and friends their handicrafts and drawings. They were told to stand close to their artwork, which was spread out around the space, to explain it. Alissa was the youngest. She showed us her best work, a masterpiece of Dresden whitework that her grandmother had started and she had finished herself, and a skirt for her doll, to make it look like the “big” girls she had seen in the museum of Akropolis.
It seems, however, that her father had started the process of reuniting the family, because the subsequent journeys seemed to have a specific destination, although the child did not go straight to Sweden. She spent some time in Germany, where she attended art lessons. She was 11 years old when she finally arrived in Sweden, her handicrafts almost a profession. Her father had been granted a residence permit and her mother worked for a cleaning service. They were joyfully reunited and Alissa phoned her grandmother.
She went to a normal school for the first time. Her teachers found that she was very good at maths, logic and geometry, presumably due to her many years of practical experience with gridded embroidery fabric and counting stitches, calculating the space and making the lines exact. However, living under difficult circumstances with people speaking many different languages as a child meant she found language lessons hard. Grammar and spelling took her a little longer.
I don’t know how Alissa’s story continued, the story of a child who learned to use difficult, old-fashioned decorative techniques in an age when they belong to museums. I hope her talents found fertile ground and the cross-cultural richness of her forced travels continued to nourish her soul. I like to imagine her in a museum, preserving lacework and teaching the techniques of yesteryear.
Drawing from Alissa’s story, the Encounters on Canvas exhibition explores specific instances of transcultural interlacing on fabrics, throughout their chaîne opératoire (raw materials, techniques, patterns, etc.), and their diverse uses, without forgetting the human beings on the move who have always been the forebears of this rich European tradition.
The submitted story’s plot shows that European heritage and its corresponding knowhow as a constitutive part thereof, can be transmitted outside current European borders and return to Europe via refugees’ geographical and educational trajectories. Little Alisa does moreover not heed intra-European differences that she can only perceive in her journey as varying weaving and stitching techniques and patterns. The story thus stands as a metaphor for the urgent need to deconstruct restrictive understandings of heritage in terms of local anchorage. Heterogeneous as it is, European heritage is both smaller and larger than added parts of Europe’s territory. Via her grandmother, little Alisa started learning refined forms of European textile handicraft from French nuns who remained in Syria after the end of colonialism and “brings it back” to a post-colonial but also “post-industrial” Europe where hardly anyone still remembers it, all while longing for climate-friendly products and an ecological lifestyle. In the longer version of the story, traumatised Alisa becomes a textile museum curator.
The concurrently submitted action focuses on numerous instances of transcultural transference in the textile sector (whether intra- or extra-European, carried along by persons, techniques or artefacts, in profoundly different modalities and contexts of exchange).The focus on the inextricable intertwining of origins in the creation of European material culture as we know and use it today is of course a message geared against identitarian conceptions of European cultures. It opposes intolerance and nationalistic or even racist conceptualisations of heritage and aims to deprive xenophobia from its main arguments. With respect to European (and universal) human rights, other relevant themes are human dignity, gender equality, access to education, the right to international protection, protection of the rights of the child, free movement and the protection of nature and of cultural goods.