Textile Stories: After-Visions focuses on textiles as a metaphor for the transmission of knowledge, memory, and history. Textile traditions have been passed down through generations, often made collectively, some of which have been documented in the Textile Stories Archive. The preservation and continuation of textile-making demonstrates the resilience of material cultural practices, despite modernization. In this exhibition, the idea of knowledge sharing and community becomes the thread, suggesting continuity: the ways textile traditions move after the loom, beyond craft and fiber, into performance, collective action, and acts of gathering.

The site-specific installations in Textile Stories: After-Visions were made on November 20 and 21, 2025, with instructions provided by artists Isabel Padilla Bonelli and Liene Bosquê. Local makers merged their gestures with the artists’, creating a shared authorship and a work that is as much about process as about object. The local interpretation, materials, and context shaped the result.

Liene Bosquê is interested in the relationship between places and people. Impressions creates a dialogue with natural, urban, architectural, and personal spaces. On November 20, 2025, the participants Charlotte Wielage, Silja Teresa Huppertz, Hanna Maxi Schumacher, and Cristina Escobar participated in a one-hour walk around Oberbilk, making impressions of the environment with clay and inviting passers-by to join in. The clay impressions chronicle the traces and history of space and represent a collective effort of engaging with the environment.

Isabel Padilla Bonelli is an Afro-Puerto Rican artist whose practice explores themes of home, belonging, and Caribbean architectural archives through mixed media. Her work often juxtaposes “hard and soft” materials and imagery such as ironwork, graffiti, and textiles, referencing Puerto Rico’s colonial architectural elements while questioning their ties to exclusion, territory, and beauty in domestic space. On November 21, 2025, participants Michelle Gallagher, Dolors Planiol, Charlotte Wielange, Silja Teresa Huppertz, Maxima Bettina Schürman, and Künhardt Alvarez created paper weavings using photographs showing architectural details in Chicago and Puerto Rico, weaving together the elements of each space the artist calls home.

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the public was invited to participate in an additional collaborative weaving piece, created by Liene and Isabel. Using fabrics dyed with rust by Isabel Padilla Bonelli and Sofia Magdits Espínoza, participants were invited to weave on the window bars that had been deinstalled from one of the windows at KöX. Once discarded, the window gained a new significance, merging the history of the building and the geography of the city with the personal histories of the artists and everyone who participated in the weaving process.

Textile Stories was presented alongside artworks made for Gesichter der Stadt, a children’s workshop that took place in early November, led by Hanna Kuster.

Participants: Liene Bosquê and Isabel Padilla Bonelli

Supported by: Kulturamt Düsseldorf