Today I will present part of my doctoral research with the title Cut, Trace, Design, Repeat, Clothing Patterns and Materializing Knowledge in Family Memory. about how the creative knowledge and labour migration in the textile and clothing industries between Turkey and Austria became part of family memory, as my main focus will be the period from 1970s to 2000s. My research is based on a local case study, the Vorarlberg region, Textile and Embroidery Centre of Austria. Although I'm researching also on institutional archives like guild, vocational school, schools and economic archives, I will here focus on the vernacular ones that skilled textile workers, tailors or dressmakers keep at their homes. Labor migration has been examined in relation to integration policies and citizenship, focusing on the caretaking and cleaning labor market. And Turkey-oriented critical fashion studies focus mainly on the veil in terms of fashion frameworks. Connecting design history, textile history, and migration studies brings together literature from disparate fields, which have so far not been brought into dialogue with each other. An important inspiration for this project have been the various research projects dealing with the changing meanings of home and homemaking in migrant communities. These projects engage with material culture studies as well as personal stories. However, these perspectives leave a lacuna, the qualified and creative dimension of labor migration. Men and many women from migrant backgrounds contributed to the textile industry and took part in the tailoring practice. In Austria, immigration of sartorial workers focused particularly on Vorarlberg. Now I will first briefly introduce the theoretical foundations of my project. Secondly, I will show the relation of migrant knowledge and memory through fragmented individual narrations and archival material, as I will question how they can be assembled to create a global fashion history. This project builds upon firstly two interconnected research concepts, sartorial exchanges and transnational knowledge transfers. What I mean by sartorial exchanges is firstly material exchanges of textiles and garments through interactions. Embedded in these material sartorial exchanges are secondly transnational knowledge transfers involving a more intellectual educational level of interactions. Building on research in transnational history, this project stems from two mobilities, migrant labor and sartorial exchanges. It investigates when and how these two mobilities intersected, creating opportunities for knowledge transfers, following flows and networks. networks. Therefore, it aims to fill part of the lacuna identified by Simone Lessig and Sven Steinberg concerning knowledge on the move and migrants as producers, conveyors and translators of knowledge. As material transfers, clothing patterns play a significant role. They are design models which facilitate circulation of design ideas. While my research combines fashion and design history with migration studies and material culture studies, I ask how to employ patterns not just as objects of research, but as a concept and methodology to analyze the dynamic material, cultural and social experiences of creative labour migration. So how does one make these patterns and why do we need them? One way of making garments is to sew fabric pieces together, which are duplicated through customized shapes. These patterns reflect the individual size, shape, and posture of a human figure. This method of production involves several stages of copying, and it helps the designer's ideas to be reproduced also by assistants and seamstresses. So these patterns hold the knowledge of the specific design in pieces. Factories use also patterns to cut fabrics based on specific clothing sizes, large, medium, small, in a very basic scale. in a very basic scale. Interestingly, even cutting processes was used to be operated by skilled workers. So each time cutting patterns are used, there is a reference to a bad body or a bodily performance from the past, as well as a reference to a design from the past. In principle, patterns enable designs to resurface in the future. Fashion historian and theorist Gertrude Lehner thinks that garments could be analysed similar to imagines agentes, images that act, pointing to the strong effect of certain textile patterns and fashion items. These images that act are the basis of remembering since they refer to a sequence of images which appear in our mind. These patterns, repeated through the years, embedded with social performances and experiences, can create a sequence for remembering. Connected to it, art historian and cultural theorist Abby Warburg uses the concept of Bild der Fahrzeuge, image vehicles, to analyze migrating images, motifs and archetypes. This theoretical approach can be also applied to the migration of concepts, objects and people. As they migrate, they transform and create various converging paths through appropriation, repetition and transformation, filling the gaps of one another. filling the gaps of one another. Building on this, I focus on official archival negligence and lack of individual testimonies, and how displacement of knowledge is and is not reflected within the archival structures and practices of collecting. Oral history and vernacular archives become important to look for different narrations in hegemonic sartorial history, which is made around a heroic creative designer and who writes about them. As Aşin Mende put it, I quote, we often forget not that all documents are destined to be archives. In any given cultural system, only some documents fulfill the criteria of archivability, end of quote. Therefore, it is important to inquire what has been archivalized and why, as well as how the archive's structure shapes our understanding of historical developments. My research project on the archives aimed to mobilize the records of memory and create another narration based on the subjectivities of migrants. Beside my insider identity as a migrant coming from a creative field, as a migrant coming from a creative field, researching on the gaps and connections in archival material led me to work on the plurality of voices and their relation to institutional structures. I'm arguing that creativity is also work and present but translated and archived differently. Or in some cases the results overshadowed the process but it is the roots and in between spaces where the knowledge production happens. It is also where the gaps become visible since migration history is made of discontinuities as much as much as continuities. And finally there are some images. I conducted research at the Wirtschaftsarchiv for Alberg, its economic archive in English. Founded as a non-profit organization, this archive collected most of the textile history of the region. The archival record, however, is fragmented. The institutional interest of the archive lay on the economic and social history of the region. Migrants here only appear as temporary labor force. Vocational training is archivalized through official reports. While these are extensive and relevant, the creative labor by the students has not become part of the archive. The textile industry, migration and creativity remain therefore disconnected in institutional knowledge. The archive lacks individual records of student works except Rita Bertolini and her graduation portfolio. She is a second generation Italian migrant who is by now a well-known person in Vorarlberg, who has worked as a textile and graphic designer also with the very known company called Franz Romberg Textile Factory. And the archive has many records of this factory as well. In the last years of Bertolini's life, she handed over documents from her wide-ranging work to various institutions. She handed over documents and objects related to the textile industry to the Economic Archive. As you can see, not only the final designs are kept, but also sketches like sewing and stitching styles that she tried on a piece of cloth, and technical and artistic drawings of the conceived designs. Unfortunately, they are fragmented pieces without any further explanation about their relation to the rest of the designs. And she made these at the end of her one-year sewing class in 1980-81 at Textilschule Dornbirn, the vocational school. So this Textilschule provided both creative and technical skills to be employed in the factories in Vorarlberg, like Franz Stromberg I just mentioned, employed in the factories in Vorarlberg, like Franz Stromberg I just mentioned, and thus to contribute creatively and technically to the company's design collections. There were many other textile companies based here, and often family businesses. You can see some of the major ones on the slide. And it shows how closely, this slide also shows how closely the school was connected to the industry through management and teaching staff. The school shared with me their annual reports as part of the official knowledge transfers. It was very important, these and significant they show study plans and the exchanges of the students and instructors as well as the quantitative dimension of migration and the training that the students taught which fahshule which classes they took and there is some fragmented still information because you cannot really see if they were really graduated or not, but you can see they attended classes. However, to make the connections visible and to create a more accurate narration, this project requires individual narratives from the makers of these clothes and designs. Institutional archives lack the connections and thus vernacular archives are needed to fill these gaps. Migrants from both rural and urban areas of Turkey brought with them technical skills as well as craft and creativity for the textile trade. They had acquired it through an official education like kinship and official education like apprenticeships, exams and certificates. This is also reflected in the interviews I conducted as well as in the oral history interviews kept at Virsaf's archive. These interviews demonstrate that Vorarlberg textile companies hired skilled textile workers from Turkey. I collaborated with Fatih Özçelik from Vorarlberg Museum, who comes himself from a textile workers family, they are migrants from Bolu, Turkey to Dörnbin, and who studied himself textile chemistry at the Textile Schule. I talked to 27 migrants from 2022 to 2024 from various regions of Vorarlberg. 22 women and 5 men. This object at the background, you can see an object, and this is also donated to the museum after my interview, or we call them actually talks, not interview because there's very semi structured and informal talks, which takes hours like it's not a question and answer format, but it's much more free going and that takes the whole day for one interview usually. And Hüseyin Kulil donated these rulers. Those are tailor rulers and the thimble attached to them to the museum. The companies that hired the laborers specialized, for instance, in children's clothing, underwear, sleepwear, shirts, pants, or jackets. So they had very specialized branches for specialized jobs. jobs. And even cutting, from cutting to or as a Springer, someone who jumps from one job to another when it is needed because he or she was qualified to do any job. Creativity doesn't only entail the artistic design work defined by the cultural norms, but also domestic production of clothes, including the models through the stages of production. That's how patterns as design models are important for creating a structure in the fragmented narrations of sartorial history, between Turkey and Vorarlberg, between factory and home. Work and production experiences in Vorarlberg were very much intertwined with the migration and life itself. According to Salih Hashan Turk and Binur Tüzün whom I interviewed together, Vorarlberg and especially Lüste now was the perfect place for women to make a living while staying at home and taking care of their children. Embroidery companies were offering flexible and part-time working hours and this working arrangement targeted especially women who had children. Embroidered fabrics were brought by company workers to homes and picked up after the work was done. The main task was correcting the mistakes of the machines by hand. Ms. Şentürk is the founder of the owner of Şentürk Dantelcilik Embroidery in Lüstenau. Here on the image you can see her company's catalogue from the 1990s. She is very famous in the embroidery business in Vorarlberg with customers all around the world, from Turkey to Europe and to the United States. As you can see, the catalog is in Turkish, since most of her customers were from Turkey or from migrant communities from Turkey. There is also another reason for that that they were so popular between with a Turkey connection because embroidery was popular to make dowry for both in migrant communities and in Turkey. So before getting married these hand works but. But these were machine made, so not handmade. These with the machine, the fabrics were done. Çanturk has worked only for a short time in a factory. After maternity leave, she worked from home. Later on, she built her own atelier at home and started her own business. She was a very successful and productive business woman creating a very large network through personal connections but as well as taking every opportunity to show at the international expos. Binur Tüzün, she is also a writer herself, she published a storybook with her two sisters worked for Shentürk in her atelier when she was also looking after her own children. Şentürk here followed the example of the embroidery factories in Lüstenau, which were providing women work from home. work from home. It might look like embroidery was more related with home textile and has no connection with clothing but it was used also for underwear and sleepwear. These fabrics were meters long and workers were repeatedly cutting the same motifs or correcting the mistakes the machines made. Here on the image you can see one of these motifs which was cut. This study shows that embroidery industry was intertwined with the home production, creating informal economic structures where design knowledge met everyday life. Shantuk took this working method for women, she recycled, repurposed it as she did with the materials she bought with cheaper prices from the companies. I interviewed also people who were not sartorial workers, but whose names appeared very often during our talks. One of these people was Serpil Polat in the Turkish community. One of these people was Serpil Polat in the Turkish community. She is a very known translator. She is a second generation migrant from Turkey whose parents were textile workers in Vorarlberg. She worked at the factories as a translator and helped mostly women workers in official businesses, courts and retirement procedures between Turkey and Austria. She taught also at Arbay Takamak Chamber of Labor, organized with them, organized with Arbay Takamak. She gave sewing, she organized sewing and cooking classes in the 1990s with the initiation of Arbay Takama and using her connections, her institutional connections. And she used her connections from the factories as well as two women here. I will just show some images from the works they have done, gave these classes independent from each other because they were located in different regions of Faralbek. Mürüvvet Targuçluoğlu was one of the instructors and she was born and raised in Istanbul, educated in tailoring, already working in one of the shops in Beyoğlu popular place for clothing shop where the clothing shops are and she worked there as an apprentice. She applied for the call of recruitment, started working in Ustenao and in a year brought her husband and her child from Turkey. Here on the left, you see a pattern for a baby shoe. It's a very simple shape. It almost doesn't need any patterns to be remembered, especially considering how skillful and educated she was. Why does she keep them? That's the question. She was working at a company for children's confection and she copied many patterns from the factory and used them to make gifts to her family members as well as to sell since she was working also at home. They are the objects of memorabilia and its entanglements with the social precedes the function. Here the image in the middle is even more difficult to guess, but it's the brim of a hat, as the right image can give a clue. She repurposed her own X-ray image to make hats. These images show some of the real patterns that were kept by her. They represent the mediator objects between home and work. And these objects are at the same time very personal because they hold the transfers between family members. Her involvement in the sewing workshops, however, reflect how these experiences were transferred to other women coming from migrant backgrounds. Like Ms. Hörgüşlüoğlu, Sacide Isır, she is with the black dress on the left, gave sewing classes and these workshops show how material literal pattern is embedded to social performances and knowledge transfers. At the end of these workshops, some of the participants presented their creations by wearing them. And you can see also in the image here. in the image here. But not only in the fashion shows that Arbay Takamu organized, but also in their private lives. For example, one of the participants made her own wedding dress. Ms. Isır was educated in Turkey as a tailor, seamstress. In Turkish, it's the same word, terzi, so there is no gender difference used. And came in 1971 from Turkey to Frastans, following her husband. And she worked in several factories, but mostly worked from home after an accident. after an accident, both in Turkey and in Frastan as an independent tailor selling clothing pieces, aprons mostly for example, as well as hand embroidered tablecloths. So craft was also part of this process not just machine-made clothes. Her and her husband's connections from the factories became her customers, since they have also lived the whole time at her husband's, who was working in a paper company, and they were living in these companies' flats. This example shows again how closely domestic and factory lives were intertwined as much as their lives between Vorarlberg and Turkey. The patterns change their material form in a way migrate based on the possibilities provided to them and possibilities they create between home and factory and work and life. At one point these design models leave their materiality and become a narration and a memory for them and for their children. As I stated in the beginning, besides the familial connection, there is also an institutional dimension into disseminating design knowledge regionally and globally. Some of the children from migrant families from Turkey attended also vocational or fashion schools. Coming to an end of my presentation, I will share Emine Sabo's photograph and her mother was a skilled textile worker whom I also interviewed. She, Emine, she studied confection at the Textil Schule again, which supported regional and international cooperations for students and instructors, as I mentioned also earlier. And amongst many fashion shows they made, this image was one of the records she was able to find. A Facebook image sent through WhatsApp. This was her graduation work worn by her neighbor's daughter at her henna night, her bridal shower. Even this institutional connection is entangled with personal lives. For the Alberg region, as a final remark, I want to say that the Alberg region challenges the dominant narratives of gender, creativity, and work. And sartorial knowledge becomes very dynamic as it travels through various medial formats and being at the same time very personal and global. It's part of the family memory, but at the same time, part of the global design history. Thank you for your attention and listening. Thank you. Oh, I thought there was a step. Thank you very much. So we'll just open up to questions. I think my microphone's on. From the audience first, Thank you very much. So we'll just open up to questions. I think my microphone's on. From the audience first. Yeah. It's not a good first question. Ah, sorry. It's not a good first question because it immediately leads to something that might be tangential at best to your research. Thank you very much for that fascinating presentation. Turkish background seamstresses and tailors, whether they interact with non-Austrian or other migrant groups that are in the textile industry. Because there's this famous tradition of connections with Western Africa, African, Western African closing industry in Vorarlberg. And that's what I'm saying. It's not a good first question it should have been the third question or something but anyhow you maybe somebody else is a better first question and you can answer that one later do you want to respond first I think it was good first I think was the first question it's fine. Yeah. The African lace you're talking about, that's part of my also research when we talk about the embroidery and Lustenau and African lace is also, I also made interviews about that. First, I wasn't considering that as part of my research because I was very much focused on clothing. But as I see this traveling concepts and how the material form also changes, it comes together to different fragmented pieces and embroidery and African lace also one of the projects I'm looking at and one of the very famous production company who makes them are also they come from Turkey and they make the still the business and they have he the son is now took over his father's job but still it's going on and considering the loss of interest in textile business, it's still amazing that it's still going on. But I don't know if I answered the question. Actually very well, because I understand that there is kind of a triangularity. Oh, I'm so sorry. There's kind of a triangularity that involves Turkish agency that somehow enters the West African market via Luzdun. Yeah, you did answer my question. Thank you. Yeah, there are many, many fabrics and also machinery, which also went from Turkey, from for Alberg to Turkey but at the same time to customers coming especially to the shops and these shops and yeah the transfers going on still so our next question thanks. I want to ask you about your journey, your research journey. How did you come to this place in Vorarlberg? Do you have a certain personal relation with this process? And did you find certain personal areas when you were looking for the archives in textiles? Thank you for this question as well. And as I said, my journey started in 2022. And I made several trips to Vorarlberg and stayed there for a couple of weeks. And my connection was Fatih Özçelik, as I said, from Vorarlberg Museum, and he had many connections. And it was some interviews or the interview partners were found on the spot for the next day. Sometimes we didn't have very strict plans because it's very difficult to, because there's also this, the migrants, sometimes they went to, they go to Turkey, of course, and stay six months. So there is a really limited time when you can actually do your research as well, not the summer times, definitely not, or the bayrams. And these are the times that, and also from there, sometimes I found the connections myself through other people I met there. But the first connections were always initiated with my connection from Vorarlberg Museum and himself. He's also from text, his parents, I interviewed his parents too. And they are also from textile, coming from a textile legacy, I can say. So it's not very difficult to find. Many people's parents or mother or father-in-law, they are all coming from textile businesses. We've got a question, Lena. Thank you very much. I was wondering, you spoke to so many people. I guess you have an immense amount of material, both recordings and writings, as well as images and so on. And I was wondering, how are you organizing it somehow? Are you working in clusters? Or how does it come into a shape that makes it possible for you to detect certain information, let's say? Thank you, Lina. And the interesting thing is, at first I thought in the beginning that's enough. I have 10 interviews, but I somehow I took a break a year of maternity leave and then I needed to go back to the research. And I really couldn't find myself using the old records. I really couldn't find myself using the old records. They are also related, but I needed to be attached to the whole process and the understanding of how the relations and networks work between this. Because Vorarlberg is also a big area which are fragmented kind of as places. There are regions, there are Frastans, there is Doğanbin, Lustenau, Götsiz, and they are all very much, I need to understand because I'm not also very much familiar. I don't live there. And I myself came from Turkey from 2018 to Austria. But somehow there was a connection that I always, myself came from Turkey from in 2018 to Austria. And, but somehow there was a connection that I always, it didn't feel, it always felt familiar to be there too. And that's why I had a second part of my research and I did more interviews and it became 27. And then it was easier to find the clusters. So there is the very general thing that connects the subjectivities, but also with very different variations of personal stories. It's not one just group that you can think of. But also this informal part was very dominant in narratives and how the gender, for example, also playing a role during the dynamics of the interviews and the conditions of the interviews as well. They were also an important element that shaped the whole interview process, but there were clusters and after two years and after a year of break and going there again, those clusters become more visible, but not just in the, it needed to be done like more and people were reaching out to talk and also to tell their stories. So just got a question from Monica. Thank you, Elif. Thank you for this fascinating talk. I wanted to ask you if you could give us a little bit more insight of these conversations or interviews you had which took a day sometimes at least you said so how did the materialities the textiles come into these conversations these narratives how were they interwoven and one more question I don't know if you have time but we can also talk about it later you mentioned homemaking and I was wondering what kind of narratives of homemaking you encountered. Even if you just answer one question, that would be great. Thank you. Thank you, Monika. I can start with the last one, the homemaking it's easier to it's very short and home textile and curtains making curtains or bedwesher the claw i mean it's home yeah the home textile was much more in the front, but at the same time, there was this production of aprons, for example, was also one of the very repetitive, or pyjamas related to it. So they were always hidden a bit. That's why I focused on that side, because home decoration was mainly the focus what I looked and it was also very interesting this ornamental and decoration part and becoming The first part, no I forgot. The materialities and textiles came into, were interwoven with the narratives during your conversation. And how they, the one they, yeah they, I was talking earlier before our talks, we were speaking on the phone most of the times and I was shortly talking about what my project is very one one sentence not very complicated like this but just to hear the stories how the factory life was how the you know they created the clothes they were making and it became at the same time part of and starting how they come from turkey here so it became a very uh flowing conversation which goes between this very personal side of um migration story and at the same time it was part of the conversation all the time the clothing because like i said it's uh it was really the life itself work thanks elif is there a last question or anything online okay i think we'll draw to a close there thank you very much aleph thank you