| Description: | Textile artist Pascale Goldenberg donated this wall hanging to Conflict Textiles in 2020. Through a combination of textile, colour and language she starkly conveys the violence of torture and its far reaching, devastating consequences on the lives of families and communities on a global basis. The dominant black fabric, crisscrossed with red, symbolises death and bloodshed whilst the warm yellow denotes how people continue with daily life. The “innumerable black sewing lines, sharp lines as if cut by a knife” and the “T almost cross like shape”, signify the ever present danger of further carnage.
Violence and brutality also find expression in the title, where the interplay of Spanish and German - T como Tortura (Trauer und Tod) / grief and death - combine to create an alliteration of harsh, staccato, bullet like sounds. To somehow soften this rawness, Pascale has deliberately chosen the technique of weaving “the oldest textile technology, present all over the world”, as it “forms a surface from threads to protect and to warm”.
And so, we can imagine the soft folds of fabric enveloping the tortured, shrouding the dead, sheltering the disappeared and caressing the families who have endured their loss, finding protection at last in this, Pascale’s memorial for the victims of the dictatorships.
(Pascale is currently head of the Guldusi embroidery programme in Afghanistan)
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