Ask a Balkan family in Britain what travelled in the suitcase, and sooner or later a piece of cloth enters the answer. A folded wedding textile, perhaps, or a garment kept for decades because wearing it would feel too ordinary. Those cloths, and the people who carry them, are the subject of Interweaving: Textiles between Britain and the Balkans, which opened on 9 November at the Goldsmiths Textile Collection and Constance Howard Gallery in London and runs until 21 January 2027.
Woman's chemise, possibly for maternity, possibly North Macedonia
The curators, Arbër Qerka-Gashi of Balkanism and Jelena Sofronijevic of EMPIRE LINES, work together as bunar, a word meaning water well in Albanian and many South Slavic languages. A well makes a handy image for this show. Groundwater ignores borders, and so do the habits of making and wearing cloth that run beneath the region’s many nation states. Their aim is to pull up shared memories from beneath divisions that politics has drawn above ground...
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Image Credits:
Lead: Ladies jacket with braid trim, Albania.
All further images as credited in captions and courtesy of Goldsmiths Textile Collection.