Louisa and Tusnelda are two giant characters made of textile materials. They emerged in a playful dialogue between two handicraft groups in Lichtenberg, East Berlin. The story began in summer 2017, when we got some funding from Aktionsfonds Lichtenberg’s democracy program to organise a crafts exhibition that would foster exchange between people with different backgrounds. We had already a weekly handicraft group with women at the nearby refugee home and wanted to make a project, where we’d collaborate with other handicraft enthusiasts in our neighbourhood.
Retired ladies from the Kreative Hände handicraft group, with whom we had done some yarn bombing earlier, took up the challenge to collaborate with us. We came up with the idea of a character-developing dialogue, which followed the principles of the game known as exquisite corpse. You may remember this from your childhood: one person draws first a head and folds the paper, then another person continues the drawing without seeing the head and so on. We developed the characters of Louisa and Tusnelda in the same manner.
During the first week, both groups created on their own a giant head and wrote a letter, which told who the character was. The heads were then exchanged between the groups, who would go on working on the upper bodies, adding their own touch to the character. The bodies were then exchanged again – in our large bicycle trailer – and the last task was to make the lower bodies and some additional items for the exhibition. As you can see from the photos, the process included a lot of detailed crafting. Altogether about 15 women and couple of children from various countries contributed to the textile sculpture.
So who are these giant characters? Louisa, the brunette, works as a security guard in the refugee home. She works long night shifts and has always her thermos with her. Louisa has twins and a husband, who is from Albania – her Chechnyan father was not so happy about this marriage. Louisa loves Arab cuisine, but is not yet very good in cooking. Tusnelda, whom Louisa got to know only recently in the exhibition opening, is an active senior. She has blond curls and looks young for her age. This is presumably because her grandchildren keep her busy and she has no husband. Hula-hoop yoga is one her favourite sports. Both Louisa and Tusnelda obviously love handicrafts and like to hang out on a sofa. They will continue their journey in Lichtenberg during the winter, making hopefully new friends.
Special thanks to Aktionsfonds Lichtenberg for supporting this project. We are also very grateful for all the participating crafters, who contributed to making Louisa and Tusnelda. My warm thanks go also to my friend Hannah Perner-Wilson and our volunteer coordinator Regina von Orlow – without their help this project would not have been possible.
