Last week to visit Morus exhibition in Super-Ö, Röhsska Museum
Photo 1: ”Ceremonies of Change” by Kleopatra Tsali, ”Ingeborg” by Hanna Norrna
Photo 2: ”Threads of Life” by Maja Lund, ”Like a game, building a world to live in, like a game” by Giulia Zanvit, ”Ceremonies of Change” by Kleopatra Tsali
Photo 3: still from ”Twisted BIOS” by Deborah Jeromin
Photo 4: ”Voices of Soufli” installation by the Morus group
Photo: Hanna Antonsson
Morus exhibition in Super-Ö, Röhsska museum, ends on Sunday September 28th ⏳
We are so happy for the all the good response ❤️
Photo 1: detail of ”Ritual Cloth - Talismanic Threads” by Irini Gonou
Photo 2: ”Spinning Whorls” by Anna Karlström
Photo 3: shelf in progress
Photo 4: ”Like a game, building a world to live in, like a game” by Giulia Zanvit
The Morus Silk Symposium and exhibition is realised with support from Kulturrådet, Göteborgs slöjdförening and Wilhelmina von Hallwyls Gotlandsfond
Photo: Hanna Antonsson
Ingeborg (2025)
Silk dyed with madder, pomegranate & iron
A geographical coincidence links an historical mulberry plantation for silk production with a testemony in the Visby Witchtrials (1705-1707). It all begins with Ingeborg Jonsdotter being accused for practicing cures. She is imprisoned and tortured until she confesses that she has been to the underworld, where she learned to cure with herbs and chants. With the help of threads and knots, Ingeborg measures diseases and deciphers their origin. She hangs a green silk thread tied to a bone from goose around a sick person’s neck to cure convulsions. The site where she is taken to the underworld is Slottsbetningen in Visby, an area which 150 years later was transformed into a mulberry plantation. Since the start of the Morus project, the trees in Slottsbetningen have been the main providers of leaves for Hanna Norrnas’ silkworms. In her weaving, she uses pomegranate dye for green colour and for reference to the Greek myth of Persephone - captured in the underworld, when tricked by Hades to eat pomegranate seeds.
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The work is my contribution to the Morus Silk Symposium and exhibition in Super-Ö at Röhsska Museum. The exhibition is running til September 28th. Visit the Röhsska web for an overview of the program.
The Silk symposium and exhibition is realised with support from Kulturrådet, Göteborgs slöjdförening and Wilhelmina von Hallwyls Gotlandsfond
Photo: Hanna Antonsson
Workshop i Super-Ö på Röhsska museet idag kl 11-12 ✨
Lär dig processen att spinna tråd från hemodlade silkeskokonger. Plats bokas via Röhsskas aktivitets-sida på hemsidan. Drop in i mån av plats 💌
Idag är jag och Laura i utställningen 11-14 och spinner tråd av hemodlade kokonger 🤍 Kom förbi och säg hej!
Foto: larv som spinner kokong i en tallkvist, Fårö sommaren 2024
Morning 💚 We start DAY 2 of Morus Silk Symposium at @rohsska with a collage workshop in the studio downstairs 11:00-12:00
We use papers, scissors, crayons and glue to create a paper collage of the metamorphosis of the silk worm.
For 30 days, the silk worm Bombyx mori grows from two mm to approximately ninety, eating leaves from mulberry trees only. When fully grown and ready, it starts to spin its cocoon of silk. Inside the cocoon, the worm transforms into a butterfly, which eventually hatch from the cocoon, to mate and produce new eggs.
Photo: Kozubowski, Antoni, 1872, Silk Making – the science of silkworm breeding from the point of view of more recent scientific research, Krakow: Society of the Silk and Fruit Growers of Western Galicia in Krakow. Shared in CC0 (Public Domain).
Introducing Kleopatra Tsali for Morus Silk Symposium and exhibition at Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg 🌱
Kleopatra Tsali (GR) is an artist from Athens, educated at the Department of Visual and Applied Arts of the University of Western Macedonia, Jan Matejko School of Fine Arts in Krakow and Athens School of Fine Arts.
Kleopatra is a founder and organizer of Morus project, contributing to the exhibition with a new artwork, and a collaborative installation including a large material of interviews made in Soufli, Greece last year.
On day 1 of Morus Silk Symposium you will hear Kleopatra’s presentation:
DAY 1 – 6/9
12:00-12:30 – Presentation – What the Tree Heard:
Drawing from the borderlands of Thrace and the Pomak village of Roussa, where a centuries-old mulberry tree once nourished silkworms, Kleopatra’s work traces ancestral links between land, labor, and transformation. Her presentation will focus on the voices of women from Soufli who labored in the silk industry - voices drawn from newly collected sound archives. Their stories, marked by endurance and care, reveal the intimate relationship between body and material. One woman recalls healing her cracked hands with pilochoma, the red earth clay softened in water - a gesture of resilience that becomes symbolic in Kleopatra’s practice. The cocoon becomes both a symbol and a structure: a place of protection and dissolution, of holding and release. Through textiles, clay, and recorded voices, Kleopatra reflects on what it means to inhabit thresholds - between cultures, identities, and stages of life - and how acts of making can offer space for transformation and remembering.
Photos: 1) detail of Ceremonies of Change (2025), 2) portrait of Kleopatra, 3) Pagona Paralikidou, Soufli 2024, 4) Workers in the Tzivre factory in Soufli, 5) Ceremonies of Change (2025)
Introducing Irini Gonou for Morus Silk Symposium and exhibition at Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg 🌱
Irini Gonou (GR) is an artist from Athens based on Naxos, educated at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts and Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.
Irini is a founder and organizer of Morus project, contributing to the exhibition with a new artwork, and a collaborative installation including transcriptions of interviews made in Soufli, Greece. On the first day of the symposium, you will hear Irini’s presentation:
DAY 1 – 6/9
14:00-14:30: – Presentation – Ritual cloths and talismanic threads:
Sparked by childhood stories of her grandmother’s silkworm farming in Peloponnese, and the unexpected growth of a mulberry tree in her garden, Irini Gonou’s participation in the Morus project emerged as an artistic inquiry drawing material from local narratives in Greece and beyond. Through the silkworms’ life cycle, Irini reflects on broader themes of home, destination, destiny, and renewal. Her presentation considers how these creatures embody a meditative, almost spiritual model of coexistence, offering fresh insights into time, care, and creative process. Incorporating cocoon threads into her textile installations becomes a ritual of protection and invocation, guided by the silkworm’s quiet while mystical presence. By sharing seasonal observations from her breedings in Naxos island, material practices, and narrative fragments, Irini invites a dialogue on how art can hold space for slowness, cyclical knowledge, inclusiveness, interspecies and intercultural collaborations.
Photos: detail of Irini’s work and process of home-sericulture
Introducing Riven Threads by Deborah Jeromin - screening in Auditoriet, Röhsska Museum on DAY 2 of Morus Silk Symposium - 7/9
14:00-14:45 – Film Screening – Riven Threads:
The artistic documentary Riven Threads follows the way of parachute silk - from the nationalsocialist silk production as a propaganda program to the Battle of Crete in 1941, where parachutes were later reused by handcrafting women for handkerchiefs.
Mulberry hedges can still be found in a garden allotment in Leipzig today. They were planted for the silk production of the Nazis in the late 1930ies. An educational film about silk culture was also produced in Leipzig at the same time. The film Riven Threads follows the traces from the garden allotment and the determination of the silkworms to the touristic island Crete. Where rarely planes were flying, 10.000 paratroopers jumped in only one week onto the barren Island in May 1941. Cretan women, who survived the German occupation, recall their memories of the Battle of Crete and the terror of the German occupation. They cut the silken parachutes and recycled them as handkerchiefs and dresses. The handcraft processes are time units that are inscribed into their bodies and that have structured the memory.
The screening will be followed by a talk in Super-Ö at 15:00-15:30, followed by a reading and reeling-session from 15:30-16:30
Photos: film stills from Riven Threads, Deborah Jeromin DE 2020
Introducing Deborah Jeromin for Morus Silk Symposium and exhibition at Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg 🌱
Deborah Jeromin (DE) is a visual artist based in Leipzig and Crete. She studied media art at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig.
Deborah is bringing a new video – Twisted BIOS – to the Morus exhibition in Super Ö. During DAY 2 of the Morus Symposium you will get a chance to watch her artistic documentary Riven Threads in the auditorium, followed by a talk on textile memory processes, and a reading during our Reading and Reeling workshop which wraps up the events of the day. Don’t miss!
DAY 2 - 7/9
14:00-14:45 – Film Screening – Riven Threads (introduction in a separate post)
15:00-15:30 – Talk – Textile Memory Processes:
A lot of dedication is in the textile handcrafts we engage in. We spend a lot of time with the making of the textiles – spinning every centimeter of yarn, tying every knot, weaving every line, and also feeding the silkworms. All of this could be considered a form of time-based media. If we see it as such, how is the memory of this spent time inscribed in our bodies and in the textile itself? Is it already the twist of the spun thread that holds our memory? Starting from sericulture for military parachutes (as depicted in the screening of Riven Threads) being not a voluntary textile production, Deborah asks how identity and memory are interwoven with textiles in the brutal context of war. Drawing further inspiration from nature and archaic figures such as the labyrinth, she traces the spiral-like thread in search of what is saved.
15:30-16:30 – Reading and Reeling Workshop
For the reading and reeling-session, the participants are offered home-produced silk cocoons to reel thread from, while listening to readings of silk literature by the members of the Morus community in multiple languages, such as: Twisted Bios by Deborah Jeromin, Fallschirmseide / μετάξυ αλεξιπτώτων by Deborah Jeromin, Chrysalis by Hanna Norrna, Hemlighetstillståndet by Inger Christensen, and more!
Photos shows video stills from Deborah’s new video Twisted BIOS
Introducing Anna Karlström for Morus Silk Symposium and exhibition at Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg 🌱
Anna Karlström (SE) is a Senior lecturer in Cultural Heritage at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland.
DAY 1 – 6/9
14:30-15:00 – Presentation – Spinning Whorls:
For thousands of years, humans have been spinning. Just as common as this activity is the unearthing of its traces. Spindle whorls appear regularly in archaeological excavations. They are securely preserved in museum collections, sometimes exhibited, and valued because of their age and material authenticity rather than their function. Yet, spindle whorls are continuously being manufactured and used. By using such tangible cultural heritage, spinning traditions are maintained, knowledge is gained and inherited through the making, and thus create a so-called living cultural heritage. The installation Spinning Whorls explores the space where material and living cultural heritage overlap, and uncovers the added value that the embodied experience of the actual process of spinning creates.
Photo 1: from the process in the archives of Gotlands museum
Photo 2: portrait of Anna
Photo 3: Anna’s breeding process
Photo 4: spinning whorl GFC10221_100, Gotlands museum
Introducing Maja Lund for Morus Silk Symposium and exhibition at Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg 🌱
Maja Lund (DK) is a textile artist and researcher based in Copenhagen, educated in textile design and crafts at the University College of Copenhagen and holds a Master’s degree in Ethnology from University of Copenhagen.
DAY 1 – 6/9
15:00-15:30 – Presentation – Threads of Life:
Maja Lund presents her work Threads of Life - inspired by the life of Danish kingsdaughter Leonora Christina, Countess Ulfeldt (1621–1698), who was incarcerated for many years of her life. Textile crafts, silk threads and silk worms were part of keeping her hands and mind alive, and her craftwork served not only as a means of survival and solace but also as a potent medium of identity and communication. Materials and colors in the work serve as symbols to reference different stages of the silkworm metamorphosis and elements around Leonora Christina’s life.
Photos from Maja’s process
