KH-890
My project explores the national political trauma of the 20th century in Czechoslovakia.
Most Czech people still carry around traces of a national trauma from this time period, and it continues to shape our national identity and pride. This generational trauma still lives in us, even in those of us who were born after the revolution, into a free country.
I am working to unpack this trauma, engage with it, accept it, and ultimately own it.
I have developed a method of trauma healing through the act of knitting, which can also be shared with others as a guided process using my blueprint.
I decided to use a knitting machine, because it resembles the sounds and mechanical operations of a tank that was used during the many occupations we had.
Through this knitted piece, I am telling two stories— national and familial.
National history:
I have developed a language that encodes information into the knit.
Each row of this weaving represents one month. There are 1200 rows. It's separated into sections, depending on what the political situation was at that time. For each part I used a different color and different material of yarn symbolising that period. The tightness of the weave shows the firmness of political regime. Tuck stitches mark large protests.
The end result is a timeline of the 20th century in Czechoslovakia.
For the personal history:
I located the dates of birth of my ancestors within my knitting. I mark these dates with flowers, which makes a visual map of my family history through the century. Czech people don't fight back with armed power. Sometimes during demonstrations we use flowers instead, as a symbol of non-violence.
The blueprint is a guide to understanding the timeline and can be used as a manual for people to go through this process by knitting their own history
This whole project is based on heavy research about the czecholslovakian political situation in the 20th century. Once I had finished the knitting part, I put the flowers in for my family and was thinking about them in the context of the time they were born and lived in. This whole process was therapeutic in helping me to see where some of this generational trauma was coming from.
In the end, I named it KH-890. Because the name resembles the name of a weapon, but it's actually the name of the knitting machine I have used to create this.