sewn blue cotton textile curtain
embroidered and patchworked
with jeans, cotton fabric and
a transparent cotton tulle opening
dimensions: 2.60 m high x 2.72 m wide
weight 4 kilos

Anger, exhibition view municipal gallery Schloss Biesdorf, Berlin, 2020

Anger

In Anger, which is (also) the German word for Common Land, Ina Wudtke takes up the land question and quotes the shape of the village “Anger” in her textile work. “Anger” or “Allmende” (in English “commons”) refers to the village square which was used jointly as a laundry area, pasture or garden, the profits of which were shared. In their anger towards a capitalist city politics, contemporary urban activists transfer the image of the commons to the present day by recognizing the soil as a precious resource alongside water and air and strive to put it back into public hands. Next to the eye-shaped Anger place, Ina Wudtke embroidered quotes from Karl Marx and the contemporary feminist Silvia Federici, in which they mark the fencing (privatisation) of the medieval communal areas as the beginning of the capitalist age and the accompanying devaluation of women (work and reproduction).

Anger, detail, 2020