The French expression faire tapisserie figuratively means to be present without participating. It is said of a woman who attends a ball but isn’t invited to dance. She stands there like decoration – like a wall tapestry.

But Juliette Vanwaterloo does not stand with her back to the wall. She is no wallflower. The Brussels-based French artist shows how she combats violence through textile activism. Those who follow the warp and weft of her tapestries discover burning cars, shattered windows, ecological disasters, and other symptoms of a society struggling with itself. We recognize the images we see daily on social media. Images of injustice, violence, and oppression are shared non-stop and on a massive scale. But do we still truly see them? With the speed at which they pass by and the compulsive overconsumption, we have grown blind to their deeper meaning.

By embroidering, crocheting, weaving, and tufting, the artist slows down this stream of images. This deceleration restores their meaning. Vanwaterloo works like a translator, an interpreter who converts images into slow textiles. Violent details are magnified and made visible. The sense and nonsense of existence become the common thread in her oeuvre. Reality is stitched together into a critical self-portrait. A graffiti or tag offers a rebellious perspective: Vanwaterloo was here – a disobedient anarcho-doodler came along.

That this young female artist chooses textiles as her medium is also part of her message. Historically, textiles – as a domestic craft – were not considered real art by a patriarchally organized art world. On the contrary: they were a coercive tool to condition girls from well-off families. It was meant to break their spirit, bend their backbone, and raise them to become obedient, diligent, serving wives. The better a woman could embroider, the more suitable she was deemed for marriage. This disdain for textiles as a form of expression was taken up to fight back by artists as a feminist artistic practice in the 1960s and ’70s. Textile art became a symbol of female oppression, but also of resistance – and gradually acquired a full-fledged, versatile, and layered status. Today, this courageous tradition is honored by a new generation, with Juliette Vanwaterloo in the front trenches.

Faire Tapisserie invites us to take a break, so today again, textile techniques are used to make us bend. This time, it is a respectful bow. The exhibition offers an alternative to the great void left behind by social media and mobile internet.

More the ever, reflection is needed on how we are being oppressed. Emancipation is no longer just a women’s issue: it is everyone’s issue. Juliette Vanwaterloo points this out and offers us a soothing balm of irony for a deeper social injury.