Earth Memories & The Woven Palimpsest. Re-engaging with the ancient in Polissian textiles of Ukraine

The Kule Folklore Centre is pleased to present its Folklore Lunch: Earth Memories and The Woven Palimpsest. Re-engaging with the ancient in Polissian textiles of Ukraine by Kate Irvin and Andrea Mozarowski. About the presentation: In post-Perestroika Ukraine, in her ancestral village of Mozhary, the pre-Christian Goddess Mokosh (Moist Mother Earth) was delivered into the hands of Andrea Mozarowski by her aunties and village women. The goddess’s numinous figure was delineated in sacred and talismanic textiles, hand-woven from locally harvested hemp and wool on treadle looms. These weavings feature an arresting crimson figure, arms akimbo taking a protective stance, and glowing with the energy of a pulsating rhombus at its core. Andrea’s initial conception of the woven element, as a human likeness, was based on the testimony of the Mozhary artist-weavers, who described it as a battle-ready warrior —“Kozaky,” a nomenclature used only in Polissia, she later learned. In 2017, twenty years after the weavings were entrusted to Andrea for preservation, they were accepted into the collections of the RISD Museum by Kate Irvin, curator of costume and textiles. Upon seeing the figure, Kate traced the central rhombus pattern and pointed to ancient representations of the generative womb. This is a story of woven images that have become the healing ground for the breakages in narrative memory engendered by the “combination of memory and fear. The greater the energy of forgetting, the greater the horror of remembering” (Etkind). About the presenters: Kate Irvin ([email protected]) is Curator and Head of the Department of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum. There she oversees a collection of 30,000 fashion and textile items that range in date from 1500 BCE to the present and represent traditions and innovations from across the globe. Her recent collaborative exhibition project Sensing Fashion (2023) considered a selection of contemporary designer fashions through the amplifying lenses of a digital microscope, a roving camera, and a digital embroidery machine, to create a place of immersive intimacy. Another recent collaborative initiative, Inherent Vice, comprised a year-long exhibition (2022–2023) and an academic project that reframed collections care as a reparative, empathetic act that embraces both literal and metaphorical cracks as opportunities for revealing and making room for neglected narratives. Previously she curated Repair and Design Futures (2018–2019), another multidisciplinary exhibition and programming initiative that investigated mending as material intervention, metaphor, and as a call to action. With Markus Berger, she co-edited a related book Repair: Sustainable Design Futures, published by Routledge in 2022. Andrea Mozarowski is a writer and arts activist whose methods and aesthetics blend and bend genre. Her work explores revolutionary spaces of survival and interrogates the Cold War generation’s translation of parental wounding. While the archive, oral testimony, and memory traces serve as historical lenses, she writes and creates for this moment, casting paradoxes into sharp relief: a fertile, generative soil within one of Chornobyl’s exclusion zones; the persistence of oral traditions and material culture in a digital age; an earth-centred spirituality and mysticism lending themselves to a modern Jungian hermeneutic; testimonial injustice, past and present, as it relates to violence, repression, and resistance. She is a Shevchenko Foundation Literary Arts Grant recipient, Legacy Fellow at A Room Of Her Own Foundation, and has been published in Canada, the US, the UK, and India. Andrea has stood as a keynote speaker, facilitator and panelist internationally. Her full-length manuscript, Overexposure, is currently in development. https://authory.com/AndreaMozarowski Kule Folklore Centre - https://www.ualberta.ca/en/kule-folklore-centre/index.html 250 Arts and Convocation Hall University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2E6 [email protected]