MOBILE BELONGINGS

Anita Steinwidder’s series MOBILE BELONGINGS – MOBILES HAB & GUT weaves narratives of memory, care, and resistance. Discarded household textiles, embroidered cloths, flour and potato sacks enter into resonance with objects of labor—brushes, rubber gloves, agricultural chains. Fragments of domestic spaces, such as window frames and broken furniture, make experiences of loss and displacement materially tangible. These objects carry the weight of care, survival, and the often invisible labor of women. Reassembled in new constellations, they unfold a polyphonic narrative of belonging and transformation.

Here, migration is not presented as an abstract concept but as a concrete movement: packing, leaving behind, carrying forward. An embroidered cloth or a worn flour sack is more than a utilitarian object—it becomes a condensed marker of origin and biography. In times of climate crisis and wars, these artifacts acquire new urgency: they bear witness to fragility and impermanence as much as to resilience and transmission.

The focus lies on women and care work. Cleaning utensils, textiles, and chains evoke spaces of nurturing, sustaining, and preserving. Traces of wear, repair, and use reveal the physical labor that holds societies together. Out of these remnants emerges a poetic archive of the overlooked—a quiet protest against forgetting.

The works unfold an earthy, corporeal, and at the same time ritually charged aesthetic. Gloves appear like relics; chains oscillate between ornament, restraint, and connection. These strategies recall Louise Bourgeois, who used textiles as vessels of memory and conflict, as well as Kiki Smith, who translated vulnerability into immediate material presence.

Belongings signifies possession, ownership, and affiliation; mobile belongings, by contrast, are objects whose meaning shifts once they are uprooted. In this suspended state—between home and elsewhere, utility and symbol—the essence of the series takes form. It invites us to look more closely: at the objects we overlook, the hands that hold them, and the stories they carry.

• Anita Steinwidder, 2025
• Photos: Klaus Fritsch