Exhibition: The Homemade Revolution

All the links in this post are to German language homepages, sorry! But I’m sure that google translate does a good enough job for you to get the gist of a page. 

The Frankfurt Museum of Communication in Germany will be opening a special exhibition on the 25th August about the DIY revolution. The exhibition will look at the rise and relevance of the amateur crafters and why and to what end people have become involved. The exhibition producers also also have a blog which links to lots website, both in German and English. 

The exhibition includes examples from KnitHerStory, a yarnbombing project I was involved in for International Women’s Day in March this year in Vienna. 100 women knitted or crocheted objects that would decorate the route of the march (photos here). Unlike other yarnbombing projects undertaken by the same group, this time a license was sought and granted from the Vienna City Council, to ensure that the works wouldn’t be removed before the march took place. We received approval to decorate trees, street lamps etc to line the “Ring”, a road which circles Vienna’s First District and is often the site of organised protests, as many of the most important municipal buildings line it (Parliament, City Hall, University of Vienna’s main building, several major museums, theaters and the former Imperial Palace). The approval ran from the Saturday morning of the march until the following Saturday. We were warned after the approval ran out, if the works were still there they would be removed. 

However, during the night following the day of the march the MA48 (responsible for street-cleaning and rubbish disposal) were seen cutting down the wool with gardening shears. One of the women who had been involved in the project saw what was happening and protested to the men that they were allowed to hang there for another week. She was able to salvage some of the pieces, but that didn’t stop the MA48 from removing most of the items.

Following the controversy that followed and the debate about attitudes towards craft and women’s art work , the Frankfurt Museum of Communication contacted KnitHerStory and asked whether they could borrow some items for the exhibition. Mine - the patchwork-style rainbow flag - wasn’t saved, so I can’t pretend to be an internationally exhibited knitting artist, but it did hang veeeery close the the Vienna art history museum for almost 24 hours. Does that count?