Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum
Each chapter centers on a single object and can be read on its own. Moving from 19th-century wax figure cabinets and Nazi-era collections to Cold War exhibitions in divided Berlin and the institutional shifts after German reunification, the book traces the evolving identity of the museum and its collections. Based on fieldwork with curators, makers, and users in Italy, Germany, Poland, and Romania, it reveals how textile objects are mobilised across diverse social and political contexts. It sheds light on cross-border movements, the political uses of textiles under fascist and communist regimes, their periods of neglect, and their reinvention as heritage or tourist objects.
The book reimagines museums as weaving devices—dynamic, relational machines that knot together people, objects, histories, and more-than-human worlds in shifting entanglements. To view the museum as a weaving device is to acknowledge its inherent motion: never settled, always reconfiguring. The textures it produces—from erasure and extraction to care and safeguarding—are woven not only into the collections but into the institution’s very fabric. In this framework, the loom becomes more than a metaphor for continuity; it signifies frictions, ruptures, and ongoing efforts to unbind, rebind, and repair. Weaving, both as method and metaphor, foregrounds entanglement—the understanding that threads cannot be followed without sometimes unraveling the whole. Like any craft, it entails acts of creation and undoing, care and violence.
The book also introduces the concept of prefigurative collection development—a curatorial approach that unsettles extractive legacies and opens space for more situated, inclusive, and future-oriented storytelling. Museums are reimagined as devices of possibility: lively, improvisational, and open-ended, with the potential to craft reparative futures.
New Books Network podcast about the book: https://newbooksnetwork.com/weaving-europe-crafting-the-museum#
The book is available here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/weaving-europe-crafting-the-museum-9781350226739/