Hannah Arendt wrote on the public and private realm, the difference was ultimately due to a difference between things that are designated either for the public or for seclusion (Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958). Activities that are almost exclusively to be carried out by women are meant to remain hidden from view. They concern the home, they generally make a home what it is — caring and beautifying activities. In most cases these are labors of love. Always unpaid. Hardly worth a mention.

The same applies to textiles. Wool, for example, is only visible in the public if it is made into clothing and is worn on the body. Again it is almost always exclusively women who do handiwork. They do it for themselves, but mostly also for the family, the children. Again these are labors of love, again not paid, and nothing to speak of.

Thus the hat made of toilet rolls in the project unHEIMelig — wenn das Private öffentlich wird (Uncanny — If the Private Becomes Public) is a symbol of the private that pushes into the public. Crocheted, a work that is meant to ornament and make the home comfortable. As a forgotten artifact, as abject, it pushes disproportionately, and thus alienated and alienating, into the public space: in the private realm it is intended as a concealing ornament and thus allows apartments to become decorated ghosts — idylls, stages of idealized images of the self and the family. Through the outsized display in public space, it exposes the masquerade for which it stands. The familiar homeliness becomes uncanniness.