Sybil III

Back in May 2021, a journey through Siena, Tuscany, had drawn my attention to the sibyls; prophetesses of the future. As the future is not getting brighter, I decided to continue on this trajectory and created two new tapestries The technique of Jacquard weaves all the loose ends together to a whole. I see the prophecy not as a prediction but as a mirror, a warning and an invitation. My collage way of working is addressing shreds of thoughts of our increasingly fragmented world. The YES of the first spoken words of my daughter stretches across a tapestry with crystalline certainty. FULL CARE appears as a wordplay that screams to be careful with our planet while a Barbapapa figure is holding ribbons based on a street graffiti I saw.  Below there is Ananke, the Greek goddess of necessity and fate. Even the gods were not immune to her power I wish this was the case in real life! On the right-side Oxytocin, the hormone of love. Woven Ribbons hoping for peace on earth!

Folding screen / Paravent
 

Before having a family, I had a paper agenda. Nowadays google calendar became my new daily planning workmate helping me organizing weekly life. Very soon I was missing my scribbles, birthday cakes drawn over some days or long arrows crossing the page. I decided to create a folding screen - knitted sculpture based on the notion of the agenda. While looking at the symbols of the google calendar I realized the button Add Time is the main subject… I wish I had more time for everything. I printed out some pages and gave it to my daughter Lola for drawing over it. She is happily shaking everything up and keeping everything loose and alive!
The tactile paravent remind us that our expectations of a frictionless existence are absurd. In Japanese culture, the folding screen — byōbu — literally means “protection against the wind,” a concept deeply intertwined with the seasons and the acceptance of change.

Sybil IV talks about a darker side of our world state. I used a collage way of working addressing shreds of thoughts and struggles of our increasingly fragmented world. The tapestry depicts NUT ancient Egyptian goddess of the sky, stars, and heavens. I discovered her in 2023 during my Pro Helvetia residency in Cairo. Traditionally depicted as a star-covered nude figure arching over the Earth. NUT’s celestial body here becomes confronted with absence. I decided to collage her addressing nowadays almost starless sky, as in early 2026 approximately 15,000 artificial satellites orbit our Earth and impact our night sky. The speech bubble is filled with the question related to the cover of (April, 2017) Time Magazine that featured ‘Is Truth Dead’. Still very relevant to me in our current AI era. One day I got this little house made out of characters (ASCII) from a friend looking for a house in Amsterdam. The computer screen has become an extra ‘window’ in our homes but it is also a camera that looks back at us. Linked to the presence of NUT I decided to weave: Wo sind die Sterne? Where are the stars? written on the Bordeaux ribbon. (font @Fraser) merci! The title of the show ‘Add time’ appears taken from the interface of Google calendar in-between snakes of week days endlessly repeating. On the left side I depicted a silhouette of Charlie Chaplin from his film The Great Dictator (1940) gazing sceptically at the world; an echo of political absurdity.