The Berlin based artist Folke Köbberling is scholarship holder of Artists in Wittenberger Weg in September 2019. She brought sheep’s wool from Berlin. Many helped to twist threads out of it and Folke Köbberling crocheted a thick carpet for the “Wiesencafé”.
Folke Köbberling, DEWOOL, 2018, Konsumverein Braunschweig
Domestic raw wool is a material that has hardly any value due to the globalisation of markets. Instead of using locally produced raw wool, processed wool is imported from New Zealand or South Africa.
In Germany, sheep are mainly used to preserve the cultural landscape. The necessary infrastructure for recycling the resulting wool is not available. This leaves the
raw wool worthless. In the GDR, a shearing (the wool of a sheep) had the value of half a month’s salary. In the year 2018 the raw wool was mostly ploughed under by the shepherds or treated as waste.
Folke Köbberling will use the local resource – which insulates, acoustically filters, smells, greases, heals, warms and insulates – to create something together with the local people and guests.
Folke Köbberling is a visual artist, lives in Berlin and teaches at the TU Braunschweig.
Folke Köbberling crochets a woolen carpet on the platform of the Wiesencafé, September 2019.
