From traps to camps
While working on my book Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum, I became increasingly interested in objects woven from plant material. In 2020, while exploring the collections of the Museum of European Cultures (MEK) in Berlin, I accidentally came across woven baskets from Sardinia, which at the time were being documented in preparation for the forthcoming exhibition ALL HANDS ON: Basketry. They were part of a large colllection assembled in Sardinia by Julius Konietzko in 1935. The curator was also keen to learn more about the stories behind these objects, and I eventually added them to the set of artefacts traced in my project. This opened up a completely new field for me, raising entirely new questions about multispecies weaving, heritage ecologies in wetland contexts, the relationship between intangible heritage and social and environmental justice, and the transforming materialities of these lagoonscapes.
My recent article published in the Journal of Material Culture draws on ethnographic research prompted by these MEK collections. Following fish traps from the Berlin museum to the bottom of the lagoon, and contrasting nasse traps made from plant material with synthetic ghost traps submerged in the Gulf of Oristano, I consider how synthetic materials exercise an indiscriminate, chronic agency that extends beyond individual objects and designs. This allowed me to think about new modalities of entrapment that emerge through plastic materialities.
You can read the open access article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/13591835261502194