When Borders Matter: Crafting Borders in a Participatory Artistic Project at Trapholt Museum

ABSTRACT

In 2020, 778 embroiderers co-created a textile artwork at the Danish museum Trapholt. Textile artist Iben Høj developed the artistic design, and citizens contributed 713 embroideries, which Høj assembled in a huge mobile, exhibited at Trapholt 2020–21. The project, Stitches Beyond Borders, was part of a celebration of the cession of North Schleswig from Germany to Denmark in 1920. However, the project addressed not only the centenary but also invited the participants to reflect on other borders and boundaries. This combination—of a national celebration and an open theme of borders and boundaries—attracted our interest. For how would Stitches Beyond Borders combine a contested topic like borders with a national celebration? How would diverse and potentially antagonistic understandings of borders interact in the participatory process and product? Based on an analysis of diverse and rich empirical material, we relate these questions to the controversial socio-political bordering practices in Denmark and theories of borders, participation, and craft. We analyze a borderscape of competing meanings and conclude that although Stitches Beyond Borders was a highly successful participatory, artistic craft project, it only partly fulfilled its unique potential to address contemporary bordering practices and create alternative imaginaries, subjectivities and agencies.

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KEYWORDS:

• Borderlands
• culture
• identity
• nationalism
• borders
• boundaries

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the survey, all the respondents except two identify themselves as women, 63% are aged 50–69, 21% are 70+, 13% are 30–49, and less than 3% below 30. We discuss the gender aspect of SBB in Sørensen and Eriksson (2022).

2 Other workshops took place at community centres, folk high schools, a museum and gallery. We contacted all the local organizers and chose our fieldwork sites among those who responded positively and had open access to their workshops.

3 As some participants co-created embroideries, the number of these is smaller than the number of embroiderers. Trapholt gave us access to the entire electronic collection of the embroideries and accompanying texts.

4 All translations from Danish have been done by the authors.

5 This was never communicated to the participants, but debated between the organisers and communicated to us.

6 Southern Jutland (Sønderjylland) is the Danish name for North Schleswig. We use Schleswig when we refer to both sides of the border, and Southern Jutland when we refer specifically to the Danish part.

7 This quote is from the text accompanying an embroidery (no. 362 in Trapholt's collection), which on the embroider/er's request was not included in the catalogue.

8 Trapholt recruited the participants through various embroidery associations, a network from previous participatory projects, and announcements on social and other media.