Fragment #1
We reflect ourselves in the courage of Karen Jeppe
With stubbornness, courage, strength and knowledge, Karen Jeppe has left her mark on the world.
We want to revive Karen Jeppe and learn from her courage and respect for people. What made a woman able to travel from Denmark alone into the world in 1903 and become a true heroine only to be forgotten by her homeland?
During a lecture on the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, Karen Jeppe felt her calling.
Driven by love for her fellow human beings, she left her secure and safe life in the village of Gylling near Aarhus, Denmark without hesitation and traveled to Urfa to help the many orphans who roamed the streets.
As the years passed and the horrors increased, Karen Jeppe single-handedly organized aid work that rescued thousands of Armenian women and children from slavery and captivity. She set up a refugee home for the ransomed and liberated Armenians in Aleppo, Syria and consciously worked to rebuild their self-respect and lost identity through focusing on needlework such as embroidery etc. Among the Armenians, she has since been known and loved and to this day is still referred to as the ‘Mother of Armenians’.
Photo:Karen JeppePhotographed by kgl. hoffotograf Elfelt
Fragment #2
We are inspired by 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'
The American writer, critic and translator Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), wrote in 1986 the essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction inspired by Elizabeth Fisher’s feminist masterpiece Woman’s creation from 1975. Here the importance of the historical, innovative role of women is emphasized, based on the time around the nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. Le Guin calls for a new narrative that is not driven forward and centered around a hero as you know it in the classical sense: a man with a spear.
Le Guin, on the other hand, offers a new feminist approach that brings the energy home, rather than pointing outward and projecting upwards. In this connection, she compares writing a novel to gathering exactly the things you need and putting them in a carrier bag.
“We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news. And yet old. Before – once you think about it, surely long before – the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger – for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in – with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.”
This excerpt from The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin is taken from theanarchistlibrary.org.
Fragment #3
We believe in mending & upcycling
Mending means ‘to repair and mend’.
If you believe in mending and upcycling, there is no such thing as waste: everything is a resource that runs in a cycle and thus nothing ends up being incinerated. We have the resources we have and we continue to use them in one form or another.
Mending and upcycling are in themselves a form of storytelling. All needlework is undeniably characterized by the hands that make the patterns. There is a huge amount of care involved in creating something beautiful, personal and useful out of something that others would otherwise throw away. That is why all bags produced under Fragments of Flight are unique and created from upcycled and recycled materials.
“Yarn work is relationships, both with those you learned it from, but also with those you make it with and those you make it for. – Yarn matters and can make a difference.”
Tina Flink initiator and coordinator in Spruttegruppen and project manager in Fragments of Flight
“… knitting is entangled with ways of “living with the past”; how memorialization – the continual process of negotiating “what is remembered, transmuted into narrative, handed from generation to generation” […] – is one of the most significant relocations of meaning and the sacred in contemporary secular society. This includes both ritualizing and remembering the families people come from and the relationships that sustain them, and commemorating their public past and collective dead.“