The project It Will Be! explores gender roles within diverse cultural
backgrounds and their relationship to the craft of sewing. The project’s
goal is to recognize and foster potential for change in how we
think about being together.
The project’s presentation at Haus am Lützowplatz is organized
in conjunction with Mama Afrika e.V. and continues Mathilde ter
Heijne’s previous projects Olacak! (DEPO, Istanbul 2010) and It Will
Be! (Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg 2014).
During the second edition of It Will Be! the participants, ranging from
refugee communities to handiwork groups, crafted hundreds of triangular
textile modules and several seating elements. Each fragment represents a
voice, an independent creation with a personal written message that
is integrated into the body of a large, ever-growing spatial sculpture –
a changeable, flowing, disintegrating and reassembling form. It depicts
a heterogeneous, multi-colored, temporary community as an
autonomous zone.
The walk-in sculpture shall be a place where people of varying origins
can meet and connect with each other. To further this mission,
there will be an accompanying program, which includes discussions,
performances, and further events, among them, an interactive audio
and video installation was created in collaboration with Michael
Gärtner and Chicks on Speed.
The project asks viewers and participants to envision political and
social utopias, where self-empowerment, creative problem solving
and cultural exchanges are paramount. It enacts these politics by
asking subjects to think about how communities are made, how integration
comes about, and how we can consider those who become
marginalized by the movements of the masses that favor sexual normatively
and homogenized identity.