We're living in a very weird world: Europe is slowly getting out of the pandemic, while the vaccine rollout continues across the world. In the meantime, while influencers are cavorting once again outside fashion show venues in Milan their borrowed designer clothes, Hong Kong is struggling to contain the highly transmissible Omicron variant after what was previously considered a successful zero Covid strategy.
Last but not least, there's a war in Ukraine. Well, to be more precise Vladimir Putin's Russia launched an invasion of the country in the early hours of Thursday morning.
International condemnation over the invasion followed and the European Union has just announced a package of sanctions such as closing its airspace to Russian aircraft, including the private jets of Russian oligarchs, and a ban on Russian-state backed television channels RT and Sputnik.
The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen also announced that, for the first time ever, the European Union will purchase weapons for Ukraine.
In the meantime, civilians are fleeing the country, while many Ukrainians, led by Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the comedian turned president who is surprising the West actively leading the resistance, are fighting against the invading forces. Zelenskiy announced the Ukrainian armed forces were in the process of setting up a foreign legion unit for international volunteers highlighting in a statement that this is "the beginning of a war against Europe, against European structures, against democracy, against basic human rights, against a global order of law, rules and peaceful coexistence."
The next few days will be crucial to see the full effects of sanctions (the rouble is expected to plummet as Russian banks have been excluded from the Swift international payments system) and understand if it will be possible to restart talks, even though things seem rather difficult at the moment and Putin also put Russia's nuclear deterrence forces on high alert.
It is therefore too early to predict what may happen in the next few days and how artists and fashion designers may respond one day to the conflict. But maybe we can find some inspirations in the past and in particular in the tradition of Afghan war rugs, that is also linked with Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994)
The Italian artist first travelled to Afghanistan in 1971, opening his One Hotel in Kabul. The hotel closed down after a few years, before the Soviet invasion, but from Italy Boetti supported Afghanistan sending financial aid to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan resistance fighter and leader of the mujahideen, but also shipping shoes to Massoud's soldiers on the mountains of the Panjshir Valley.
Boetti also kept on working with Afghan weavers who produced for him beautiful embroidered pieces and maps. They continued to do so from Pakistani refugee camps after the Soviet invasion in 1979: the new maps they depicted showed tense political realities and one tapestry was entitled "Soviet Exodus with Poppies" and included tanks and weapons.
Since then, Afghan weavers were inspired to produce further war rugs, crafts that moved from the news and integrated woven images of Kalashnikovs, tanks, flags, maps, munitions, soldiers, fighter jets, helicopters and cities. The carpets can be considered as woven history books, just like the comic strip-like Bayeux tapestry could be considered the Western Civilization's first graphic novel.
A few Ukrainian artists and designers who are also activists and are on the Russians' wanted list have also joined the resistance, so there is no time for them to be creative, but let's hope that there will be an immediate ceasefire and a restoration of peace soon and that they will be inspired to tell us their story of resistance with their words and, why not, through textiles as well.
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