'Empathic Unsettlement': trauma as spectre in contemporary textile art

'Empathic Unsettlement': trauma as spectre in contemporary textile art

Autobiographical trauma art is a way to connect its viewers with the artist and her experi- ence, and with the history in which this experience occurred. We argue that when autobio- graphical trauma art involves craft practices, such as working with textiles, the relationships between history, the artist, the artwork, and the viewer become particularly strong. The interplay between the present and past, viewer and artist, through fabrication and encounter constitute, we suggest, a series of hauntings that draw attention to something broader— structural violence, selective forgetting, or wilful ignorance—in which trauma was, and remains, situated. We use examples of textile artwork by Beata Batorowicz to explore auto- biographical trauma art as a tactile, embodied response to the intergenerational trauma arising from her family’s experiences in Poland during World War II. A line of hauntings, traceable from the artist via the artwork to the viewer, parallels the flowing effects of intergenerational trauma, but the intervention of the artist, in creatively addressing her own ghosts, offers the viewer and a wider public the opportunity to experience her truth- telling in the form of “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 2014 (2001), 41) and a new compre- hension of a past that has fallen by the wayside of history.