WEAVING PLACES: LOCATING IDENTITY THROUGH TEXTILE LANGUAGE

| by Elena Redaelli |

“Through their production, materials, and decorative motifs—closely intertwined with the cultural and social histories of different places—textiles offer a lens through which to explore cultural similarities, differences, and change. As matter, textiles are rooted in specific places, but they also trace our migrations across the globe.”
(Kettle, A. 2019)

With the exhibition chapter Weaving Places, curator Silvia Colombo and co-curator Ana Victoria Bruno guide the audience through a compelling exploration of how textile traditions reflect and have shaped geographic and cultural belonging in Norrbotten, a region in northern Sweden rich in layered identities. Part of the Futures 2025 exhibition program at HAVREMAGASINET in Boden, Sweden, the show brings together archival works, contemporary creations, and collaborative practices—honoring and at the same time redefining textiles as both an expressive medium and a tool for mapping.

Curatorial Vision: Textiles as Feminist Cartography
Curated by Silvia Colombo—an art historian with deep roots in museum practice and expertise in cultural heritage both in Italy and Sweden—and Ana Victoria Bruno—an Argentine-Italian curator whose work critically explores the postcolonial entanglements of time and space—Weaving Places is not just an exhibition, but a proposition. It questions how we might rethink territory through thread instead of maps, and how weaving is a powerful form of cultural narration, even if traditionally obscured by binary power systems.
The meeting between Colombo’s experience, tied to both international and regional cultural memory, and Bruno’s post-binary, intercultural curatorial perspective generates an exhibition that draws from the legacy of textiles as a gendered form of knowledge transmission—often overlooked. Their research challenges dominant and Eurocentric narratives of cartography and historiography, embracing the collective and often feminine roots of textile-making. This approach dismantles rigid definitions of “place”, proposing instead a fluid and multi-temporal fabric of belonging.

Textiles as Topographies of Memory
The selection of works in Weaving Places articulates an expanded vision of the concept of territory—not as something fixed or bounded, but as a space shaped by bodies, gestures, desires, and migrations. Unlike traditional cartography, these textiles record the land as lived and experienced, not merely owned, catalogued, or regulated. Each artist builds on a local textile lexicon, introducing new radical vocabularies and engaging with ecological, queer, and historical issues.

Gammelstads Handväveri: Weaving Local Identity Through Collaboration
Founded in 1966 in Luleå, the historic tapestry workshop Gammelstads Handväveri has played a vital role in both the economy and cultural fabric of Norrbotten. Its unique structure—where professional weavers collaborated with visual artists—allowed for a deep integration of regional identity into textile forms. The exhibited tapestries represent both a historical archive and a living testimony of collective authorship.

Björn Blomberg, Northern Lights (Nll 687), tapestry – Region Norrbotten’s art collection
Photo by Silvia Colombo
Among the notable works is Northern Lights by Björn Blomberg, an artist born in Stockholm but deeply connected to the northern landscape. The tapestry captures the aurora borealis both technically and conceptually—transforming an ephemeral atmospheric phenomenon into a meditative textile process. The work oscillates between figuration and abstraction, reflecting both the mysticism and materiality of the northern sky.

In contrast, Trädsjön by Gull-Britt Johansson reveals her lyrical approach to the landscape through a more abstract palette. Woven during her prolific period at the Handväveri, the piece evokes the form of a forest lake through an expressive play of colors. Her tapestry is not only an image but also an emotional map—an invitation to read feelings in the patterns and to locate oneself in the colors.

Ida Isak Westerberg: Queer Weavings

With Sompasendräll, Ida Isak Westerberg proposes a radical redefinition of site-responsive weaving. Working closely with the peatland of Sompasenvuorna, Westerberg gathers organic materials—white lichens, birch roots, bark—interweaving them with hand-dyed wool. The use of the daldräll technique, rooted in Norrbotten traditions, becomes a vehicle for expanding queer space within the landscape.
Their work blurs the boundaries between nature and textile, structure and softness. By inscribing the peatland—which Westerberg considers a metaphorically queer space—into the fabric, the artist opens new spatial imaginations. Their works are both materially grounded and ideologically expansive, suggesting that “queerness,” like weaving, is an act of ongoing emergence.

Stina Edin: Performance and Woven Worlds

Stina Edin’s textile art moves along the border between performance, sculpture, and tradition. In Monday in Maskenkrasch, she constructs a hybrid universe where craft meets chaos. Combining digital weaving, embroidery, shattered mirrors, life jackets, and electric cables, Edin layers tactile and symbolic materials to narrate an alien and intimate mythology.
Guided by the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin and textile theorist Anni Albers, the work draws from speculative fiction and feminist storytelling. The weave becomes a container for beings from other worlds—extraterrestrial, queer, playful. It is not just a textile, but a portal.
Her second piece, With You, I Want to Blossom, offers a different stage: a rosepath rug used as the scenography for an open performance in the Yrttivaara chapel. Here, weaving becomes a site of ritual, storytelling, and intersubjective experience. Figurative elements—skeletons, robots, fortune tellers—refer to impermanence and transformation. Edin suggests that weaving can be both sanctuary and rebellion.

Maja Möller: Optical Illusions and Inner Landscapes

Maja Möller’s contribution focuses on perception and psychological space. Her 2024 work Longing Out (Längta ut) is a layered tapestry where a woven frame overlays an image of trees. Inspired by drawings made by patients in a psychiatric institution, the work speaks of longing for nature and freedom—a visual metaphor for freedom constrained by institutional walls.
The duality between containment and expansion is powerful: the trees appear behind bars but also seem to push them away. The work suggests that weaving itself can be a means of liberation, making art not only therapeutic but also emancipatory.
In Firmly Tied (Fastknuten), Möller deepens this theme by focusing on the knot as both a symbolic and concrete foundation of textile practice. Rendered in trompe l’oeil, the knots emerge from the surface almost sculpturally. By emphasizing this primary unit of textile-making, the artist draws attention to weaving as one of the earliest human technologies—a primordial and enduring act of creation.

Conclusion: Weaving as World-Making Practice
Weaving Places is not just an exhibition: it is a discursive fabric, composed of multiple threads—feminist thought, local tradition, ecological presence, and queer subjectivity. Proposing textile practice as a fusion of thought and the physicality of making, the exhibition offers textiles as maps not of fixed territories, but of experiences, memories, and desires.
Thanks to its curatorial sensitivity, the works go beyond decorative or nostalgic aspects. They become acts of resistance, memory, and reinvention. Whether it’s a dräll with birch bark, a digitally woven alien landscape, or a tapestry of trees seen from a hospital window, Weaving Places reminds us that weaving marks time, ties communities, and opens portals to new ways of knowing.
In a world increasingly divided and uprooted, these threads help stitch new forms of belonging, with gentle care.