Dishoek Inventory I: The Tapestries of Zeeland

Going beyond the proposed setting, I approached the city of Middelburg as a visitor rather than a tourist. My main and perhaps only destination was the Zeeuws Museum, 3rd floor, the sea tapestries room. Bearing in mind the idea of artists-as-archivists as introduced in The Archival Impulse (2004, Hal Foster) where arguments are pushed against a melancholic perception of culture, I started to look at the textiles beyond the setting of museum display and historical moments they depict. By working in and through the archive of the Zeeuws Museum, I found a striking way by collecting everything that has to deal with the sea tapestries: sketches of the restorers, embroidering threads, notes about the trade in wool with the city of Antwerp... And so an associative story begins about the significance of the Sea Tapestries.

Kristina Benjocki is a Serbian artistic researcher currently in residence at Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht. As an artist Benjocki focuses on our biased relation to history: Study of Focus (2014) addressed the issue of groundlessness in present times by looking into tapestry traditions and history textbooks of former Yugoslavia. www.kristinabenjocki.com