How do we honour the traces of labour, the quiet strength of hands that built, spun, and shaped our shared histories? How do the walls that once echoed with the rhythm of work now speak to us of endurance, of community, of the fragile balance between survival and creation?
Arch and Pillar is She reflects on these questions through a dialogue between industrial heritage and feminine craft. The work reconsiders the site of the Spinnerei as both witness and participant, a place where stories of production and perseverance intertwine. By layering the site’s industrial memory with reinterpretations of traditional Cypriot handicrafts and Penny Monogiou’s narratives of spinners, the project seeks to reveal the invisible labour that sustains both material and social worlds.
Through its surfaces, playful yet deliberate, the work engages with the hidden languages of making: repetition as care, ornament as resistance, and form as a record of lived experience. It meditates on how craft, once confined to the domestic and the feminine, can now serve as a means of critique, healing, and renewal.
In this convergence of past and present, “Arch and Pillar is She” becomes not only an homage to those who came before, but also a vision for design as an act of restoration, restoring dignity, connection, and the delicate thread between human and environment.
ARCHIV Massiv exhibition
Baumwollspinnerei – Leipzig
Concept development and text: Yianna Tsolaki.
Designed with: Marios Charalambous and Teresa Georgallis (weaved carpet) and model arch and girl by weavers of The Cyprus Handicraft Centre.
Year produced: 2022.
Materials: 30 x 30 mm square profile steel pipe / 12mm MDF / handwoven 100% cotton yarn unmerserised.
Approximate dimensions: 3900 x 3200 x 460 mm (length x width x height)
Photo credits: Silvio Rusmigo.
© ΦΧΨ Heritage Design 2015 - 2025.
