Sending to Australia

 

Off he goes...

Three weeks ago I put my 21-yr-old onto a plane to Australia where he will spend his ‘semester abroad’. (As he is studying in the Netherlands, ‘abroad’ from our point of  view anyway, this is indeed a special situation. He could have gone to Düsseldorf, but, not surprisingly, that wasn’t abroad enough for him.) Hard to believe that the funny little boy is so grown-up that he manages and undertakes things like that by himself now. Well, not exactly or entirely by himself, the parents are paying, and some organizational matters... But now he is gone, has arrived at his destination after a short stopover in Sydney and is finding his footing in his first weeks of studies.

I used him as a kind of letter-pigeon and asked him to post a letter to India Flint which contained my contribution to her collaborative international stitching project for an exhibition in February 2027.

She had written about that on her Substack last November, asking for embroidered pieces of remembrance, all in neutral colour “with perhaps a few mother-of-pearl buttons”. I had immediately known that I wanted to contribute but had lingered as to what to embroider on my piece of linen. My father’s name? Larger issues, such as peace of mind, humankind, humanity? Slightly preposterous, but it was on my mind. Finally, I decided on 'Palästina', the German version of Palestine. That offers three opportunities to attach a mother-of-pearl button for the Umlaut-dots and the dot on the I (which my father’s name would not have made possible). And I chose the German version, because I wanted to express that my grief for Palestine is the harder for me because I am fully aware that the German persecution and attempted extinction of Jews were very influential in the founding of the state of Israel, and thus in everything that has passed in that area since then. 

I managed not  to take a photo of the finished piece from the front, but only from the back.

Backside of a piece of linen with "Palästina" stitched onto in chainstitch

 My son has let me know that he has posted the item, and it remains to be seen whether it will be visible in whatever India Flint will make out of it.