Citation Link: https://doi.org/10.25819/ubsi/11092

What if you weave your own story? Curating Authorship in WE ARE NOT CARPETS

Alternate Title
Was wäre, wenn du deine eigene Geschichte webst? Autorschaft kuratieren in WE ARE NOT CARPETS
Publication Type
Book
Series
Author(s)
Institute
Subjects
Handwoven carpet
Weaver authorship
Scopic economy
Multimodal co-curation
DDC
302.23 Medien (Kommunikationsmittel), Medienwissenschaft
GHBS-Clases
Date Issued
2026
Abstract
This article examines the collaborative research and exhibition project WE ARE NOT CARPETS: I Tell You My Story as an intervention into the socially organized anonymity of carpet weavers. The article argues that this anonymity is not simply a gap in knowledge, but a field of active not-knowing sustained by an epistemology of ignorance and by the scopic economy through which carpets circulate as cultural and narrative commodities. Against a regime of curiosity directed toward pattern, region, authenticity, technique, and price, but rarely toward the weaver, the project asked weaver-collaborators: What if, instead of weaving the market’s pre-given designs, you wove your own story? Drawing on the carpets, the weavers’ writings and reflections, collaborative curatorial practice, and audience responses across exhibitions in Cologne and Siegen, the article traces three interconnected displacements: the emergence of the weaver in an authorial position; the development of a multimodal curatorial practice that holds social recognition together with aesthetic indeterminacy; and the formation of a new literacy that reconfigures the relations among weaver, viewer, researcher, and curator. Reading through Rancière’s concepts of the distribution of the sensible and dissensus, the article argues that authorship operates here not as the addition of a missing voice, but as an interruption of the scene that separates making from the authority to determine meaning, form, circulation, and interpretation. Curating, in turn, becomes a practice of care for the circulation, return, and negotiation of meaning across the unstable seams between these positions.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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Research outputs from the University of Siegen
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University bibliography ( 2025 -)