What can textiles – coarse cloth or fine silks, work and household linen, clothes in different styles and fashions – tell us about different forms of dependency: enslavement, serfdom, forced labour, or in our own day, factory work in the Global South? How do social, economic, religious and power-political hierarchies and the dependencies they produce, and the resistance that dependencies in their turn generate, tie in with the production, distribution and the use of textiles? What types of dependency underlie the global trade routes and commodity chains for textiles and their raw materials? And why are researchers from different fields – including archaeology, history, culture studies, art history, and literary and religious studies – currently engaged in investigating such questions at the University of Bonn?

Visit our digital exhibition 'Enmeshed and Entwined: Fabrics of Dependency/Verstrickt und Verwoben: Texturen der Abhängigkeit' and let our "quilted narratives" help you explore these and further questions.

For more impressions, watch our three-minute exhibition trailer.

The trailer was filmed during setup of the pop-up exhibition at the Bonn University and State Library in October 2024, where selected exhibits were on display until the end of 2024.
From 24 April 2025 to 19 October 2025, the exhibition will be housed by the Global Heritage Lab. More details to follow soon.