Anja Schwörer: Mapping Patterns - Industrial Flora

A vertically elongated mural by the artist Anja Schwörer, who was born in Kandel in 1971 and now lives in Berlin, has been installed on the rear façade of the small industrial museum Schauweberei Braunsdorf in Niederwiesa. Coloured squares arranged in a row create a geometric image when viewed from the opposite bank of the Mühlbach stream. It is reminiscent of plant tendrils and flowers made up of pixels on a computer screen. The artist has isolated individual elements and removed them from the uniformity of the grid drawing. They shift the perfection into a lively, almost organic composition. The pixel dots printed in a green-violet colour spectrum on PVC mesh blend in with the colourfulness of the wall, which shimmers through the net-like texture of the fabric. The grid and basic shapes of Schwörer's mural Mapping Patterns: Industrial Flora refer to fabric structures, woven ornaments and the functioning of looms, which are documented, researched and demonstrated on historical machines in the show weaving mill.

The artist chose a cartridge drawing from 1897 as her motif, which was used in the textile industry as a schematic representation of a textile weave for the production of borders, ornaments, jacquard fabrics or tapestries. Until the 1950s, these patterns were designed by artists and pattern draughtsmen, translated into a kind of early programming language and punched into punched cards, which were used to control the looms. Schwörer's mural is thus a poetic, playful and site-specific reminder of the origins of computational linguistics, which obviously has its origins in the control of looms and is therefore not in fact a 20th century invention.

(Text: Alexander Ochs / Ulrike Pennewitz)