Brown Bag Seminar
Co-organized by the Center for the Study of Gender, Sociology Department, UoC
Deborah Jeromin
“Following the Threads –Parachutesilk / Μετάξι Αλεξίπτωτων (Essay, 2020) and Riven Threads / Mπερδεμένες Κλωστές (Film, 2020)-
a research on sericulture as war-production and women’s textile memories”
Tuesday, 18 May 2021, 14.30
The presentation will be about the research methods for the essay Parachutesilk / Μετάξι Αλεξίπτωτων and the artistic documentary Riven Threads / Μπερδεμένες Κλωστές.
In the six years of my research, I was following different threads – in the metaphorical but also in the literal way. I started from my garden in Leipzig, Germany, to the Island of Crete, where old women did remember the parachute silk of the Nazis and their textile handcraft. With the help of the Cretan women, I tell the brutal story of the handkerchief that was made of natural silk and maybe produced in a garden allotment in Eastern Germany in the late 1930s. Bringing the places and memories together was an intense experience for me - coming from a place where you can still find traces of forced labor and arms’ production everywhere. As an artist I use whatever technique is suitable. The connections that I made will be the topic of the presentation.
Deborah Jeromin is a visual artist, who lives in Leipzig, where she studied media art at the HGB Leipzig. Her interests are feminist history, textile handcraft processes and sites of national socialism. About them she works in installations, films, and essays. Since 2014 she was researching on the topic of the national-socialist silkproduktion for parachutes and the memories of Cretan women about the parachutes of the Battle of Crete in 1941 and the occupation of the island.
* Brown Bag Seminars at UCRC aim to create an informal atmosphere for researchers to present their ongoing research, stimulate cross-disciplinary dialogue, generate questions, and possibly some good answers.
