NeSpoon

Description

The site-specific work Harmony by the Warsaw-based artist NeSpoon unfolds as a large-scale, spider’s web-like installation made of lace doilies, which spans the architectural structures and transforms the space into a fragile fabric of lines, patterns and connections. A large proportion of the doilies used were donated by people who responded to a public appeal by the Völklinger Hütte World Cultural Heritage Site – a collective contribution that is embedded in the work both materially and symbolically. The work alludes to forms of sociability, care and collective production traditionally associated with female-connoted handicrafts. In the former, heavily male-dominated working environment of the ironworks, Harmony sets a quiet yet powerful counter-narrative against this industrial context. The delicacy of the materials stands in deliberate contrast to the site’s massive architecture, allowing its historical dimension to be experienced in a new way. Subtly, the work also alludes to the sewing school at the former ironworks, where, from 1890 onwards, the future wives of steelworks workers learnt domestic skills.