ARCHIV Massiv exhibition
The Baumwollspinnerei – Leipzig

Curated by Yianna Tsolaki

How do we understand, honour, and learn from the human stories and conditions of labour and community in these very walls? How might they inform our current challenges of survival and our needs to restore human and environmental connections towards an exit from the so-called anthropocene and capitalocene? How do these stories of industrial labour and community relate to those of traditional handicrafts around the world? How can contemporary design practices and ways of production and exhibition, starting from the critical documentation and reconfiguration of heritage practices, contribute to the projection and construction of better worlds?

In the exhibition “Arch & Pillar is She,” currently on view at Archiv Massiv at the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (cotton mill), Cypriot cultural heritage meets artistic site exploration. Together, the design collective ΦΧΨ (fihipsi) Heritage Design and artist Penny Monogiou devote their works to the architecture of the Spinnerei, women as protagonists of the art of weaving, and the history of Cyprus that connects the artists.

Monogiou, who is from Cyprus and lives in Hamburg, encountered for the first time in 2018 the place that would have a lasting impact on her future artistic practice. During her participation in the LIA – Leipzig International Art Programme, the artist lived and worked in the spaces of the Spinnerei, characterized by industrial aesthetics, where women workers once sat at their looms. The atmosphere of the place and its architectural appearance are reflected in Penny Monogiou’s paintings. Through her works, she creates spaces in which she allows the history of the cotton mill to meet historical moments from her homeland Cyprus. This cross-cultural dialogue becomes apparent in the work “Queen of Loneliness” (2018-2019), which is on view in the current exhibition at Archiv Massiv. Depicted here is Queen Berengaria, who remains a relevant figure in Cypriot historiography to this day. Monogiou places the queen in front of the muntin window typical of the Spinnerei, dresses her in a modern dress, and thus transposes the medieval figure into a contemporary setting. The work was part of the Berengaria Project realized by the curator of the Spinnerei exhibition, Yianna Tsolaki, in Cyprus in 2019.

Cross-cultural exchange, as well as the historical narratives that live on in the architecture of a place, are also the focus of the artistic creations exhibited by the ΦΧΨ Collective, which includes curator Yianna Tsolaki and designers Marios Charalambous and Constantinos Economides. In its work, the design collective deals with the architectural identity of places. It goes in search of traces of cultural heritage – in Cyprus and internationally – that is at the center of its visual and literary (re)narratives. For the exhibition at the Spinnerei, ΦΧΨ developed the work “Arch & Pillar” (2021). It is a merging of the floor plan and topography of the Spinnerei and the nearby Parkfriedhof Leipzig-Plagwitz. The work is accompanied by a video that presents other locations of the Spinnerei in an abstract manner of representation and is accompanied by music composed especially for the exhibition. Part of the work “Arch & Pillar” are also woven works that, among other things, take up the floor plan of the cemetery. The embroideries on view were made with the traditional Cypriot weaving technique Fithkiotiko. In this weaving technique there are 25 symbols of which three were chosen for the exhibition in the Archive Massiv. The girl, the arch, and the pillar. Like a common thread, these three symbols run through the exhibition. They can be found in Monogiou’s group of works “is She” (2021) as well as in the multidisciplinary work of the ΦΧΨ collective and finally culminate in the title of the exhibition “Arch and Pillar is She”.

– Lea Lynn Asbrock