Weaving colonial history
Damask is a familiar element of everyday life in Vorarlberg. Used for tablecloths, bed linen, and curtains, the fabric is synonymous with domesticity and durability, perhaps even in association with the region as such. All the more irksome was the experience that triggered the FWF-funded project “Fabricating Adjacency”: Anette Baldauf, project manager and hailing herself from Vorarlberg, was attending the Biennale and textile market in Dakar together with Katharina Weingartner, a producer at the pooldoks filmmaking company. Baldauf was fully familiar with the Getzner enterprise and other Vorarlberg textile factories as major employers in her home region. In Dakar, she unexpectedly came across company signs of this very same company headquartered in Bludenz, which has been around for more than 200 years.
It was a connection she had never been aware of before. Baldauf, an artist and researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, began to investigate and discovered that Getzner fabrics have been exported to countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal since the 1960s. As project team member Janine Jembere puts it, it was a “surprise encounter with something familiar in a completely different setting.”
Colonial interconnections
What at first seems like a peculiar coincidence takes us directly to a colonial history that has never really become part and parcel of the way the Vorarlberg region sees itself. Fabrics are not only cultural objects, but also commodities within global trade cycles. In the 18th and 19th centuries, linen played a central role in this context. “First, linen was produced in the Lake Constance region and then exchanged for slaves in West Africa. Many of these enslaved individuals were also forcibly taken to the USA and made to work on cotton plantations. The 'cheap' cotton then came from the USA to Vorarlberg and provided the material basis for industrialization,” explains Jembere.
Even though Austria did not have any colonies in the formal sense of the term, Austrian and Swiss textile factories were integrated into these trade systems. Colonialism not only made itself felt in terms of territorial rule, but also through trade, division of labor, and profit. The example of damask and linen makes it clear how deep these interconnections are and how they extend even to little Austria.
Òwú. Fil. Faden. Thread.
The artistic PEEK research project explores the intertwined history of textiles, trade, and colonial legacies. A quilt serves as the central work, connecting the cities of Vorarlberg, Lagos, St. Gallen, Vienna, and Dakar.
On accountability and adjacency
Studying the history of linen, damask, and the embroidery produced for the African market (“African lace”) inevitably leads one to Vorarlberg. The region's prosperity is not only the result of local industrial history, but is also linked to global markets such as Nigeria. Companies like Getzner and Lustenauer Stickereien have been present there for decades – a fact that one is hardly aware of in Vorarlberg.
This is how Janine Jembere sums up this asymmetry: “Companies such as Getzner are very present in Nigeria or Senegal, whereas this connection is not visible at all in Vorarlberg.” This invisibility is central to the question of accountability. The export of European fabrics is displacing local textile production in West Africa, while the profits remain in Europe. Jembere uses the term “adjacency” to describe this difficult relationship. Accountability does not arise from identification or guilt, but from proximity and the naming of a relationship. Vorarlberg thus no longer appears as a closed region, but as part of a global structure.
Textiles as substrates of history
Textiles hence play a dual role in the project: they are not only objects of study, but also substrates of history. They embody knowledge, labor, and “personal, but also larger cultural memories,” says Janine Jembere. Damask is a prime example of this situation: it is familiar here in Austria in the form of tablecloths or bed linen, and as part of everyday life in Africa as clothing. The fabric connects economics with biography and global trade structures with personal histories.
This complexity is also reflected in the art-based research approaches of the project and its team. Sasha Huber works with linen and historical invoicing lists, Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner deal with the colonial history of Vorarlberg. Milou Gabriel focuses on enslaved children and invisibility in cultures of remembrance, while Mariama Sow takes her grandmother's damask tablecloth as the starting point for a material-based examination of “white innocence.” Susanna Delali Nuwordu examines pattern books and weaving itself as knowledge production, while Janine Jembere focuses on the research group as such. This polyphony is not a side effect, but a deliberate method.
Working with the material
The group deliberately understands their research as a physical endeavor. Archival work – viewing documents and patterns – went hand in hand with sewing, embroidery, or the mastery of different textile techniques. As Jembere describes it, the aim was “not only to understand these methods of textile production intellectually, but also physically” and thus “to stay really close to the fabric.” The central output resulting from this large collaborative effort was a quilt that rewove stories and fabrics. “As everything is there at the same time, the quilt enables you to grasp connections in a non-linear way,” notes Jembere.
The quilt has been exhibited in Vorarlberg, Switzerland, Lagos, and most recently in Dakar. It not only aroused interest but also raised awareness of previously unseen connections. On the other hand, the research team's approach to archives was not about overwriting, but rather about creating an adjustment. “We do not intend to interfere with archives, but rather to add something, even if it contradicts what was there before,” says Jembere. Contradictions are made visible, not resolved. “The goal is not to resolve conflicts, but to accept awkwardness and contradictions.” The project, which also sought dialogue with the population, does not see itself as a final conclusion, but as an impetus: responsibility across global trade routes should be filled with life and carried on.
Documentary film
In parallel to this research project, the pooldoks production company made the documentary Stoff – ein Spitzengeschäft (2025) together with two Austrian and two Nigerian women directors. The film follows the arc from locations in Nigeria to colonial histories and the textile factories in Vorarlberg. In Austrian cinemas since January 30.
About the researchers
Anette Baldauf is Professor of Methodology and Epistemology and co-director of the artistic research program PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her artistic research focuses on transcultural methodologies, research ethics, and the traces of colonialism in Europe.
Janine Jembere is an artist, researcher, and cultural worker based in Vienna. In her performative, installation, and educational works, she deals with embodied knowledge, perception, and dissonance, as well as issues of ableism, race, and gender.
