Unweaving machine II

Berlin, DE 2025

Wood, drawings, industrially woven fabric

Machine: 140cm x 90cm x 50cm Fabric: variable




For the exhibition “Fabric Visions” at Esche Museum curated by Hannah Beck- Managetta and Klara Meinhardt. Esche Museum has a great collection of historic industrial knitting machines that are still running. I built a more refined 2nd version of my unweaving machine specificially for this exhibition. I used wood inlays to decorate and highlight the relationship to some of the beautiful historic machines at the museum. By using a specific green lacquer I also linked the unweaving machine to modern industrial weaving machines that part of my family is building, using the same green. The exhibition focussed on environmental and social sustainability in relation to textiles. The unweaving machine unweaves a industrially made fabric instead of creating one and thus reverses the normative process of production, this happens not automatically but by hand and I built the the machine so that it can only be operated by two people and never alone.

Curated by Hannah Beck-Mannagetta and Klara Meinhardt.

For the Unweaving Machine Prototype that I built for Contextile 2022 click here.






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Installation view at Esche Museum, Limbach-Oberfrohna during “Purple Path”, Chemnitz 2025
Someone unweaving during the exhibition, the other person is sitting on the other end of the machine and presses the same pedal at the same time to lift and lower the shafts and pull out one thread after another until the farbic is taken apart.
Testing shafts at studio
Detail of drawing on unweaving machine