Fairy tales and crafts
We are currently raising funds for the special exhibition “Today I bake, tomorrow I brew” in the Bocholt Craft Museum for 2022. The exhibition builds an innovative bridge between cultural-historical mediation and handicraft representation: The focus is on lifelike models and art figures, which on the one hand serve as eye-catchers, but at the same time serve as central objects for communicating folklore and cultural topics. With the help of informative graphics and concise texts, visitors learn the enormous role handicrafts played in the folk tales of our ancestors and which supernatural beings were invented in fairy tales and legends.
What would our fairy tales be without the poor shoemaker and the clever cook, without the friendly miller or the brave little tailor? As the heroes of the stories, it is ordinary people who experience incredible things in everyday situations at work and at home. Thus, fairy tales and legends are inseparably linked to the life experiences of our ancestors. In fairy tales, the craftsman’s workplace becomes a place where reality and the imaginative world of legend overlap. Be it brownies helping the poor tailor, poor journeyman cobblers who are drawn out into the wide world or Rumpelstiltskin who spins straw into gold on the spinning wheel: They all serve as metaphors or analogies and use ideas of trades, as they no longer exist in our everyday lives today.
In order to better understand and evaluate fairy tales, sagas and legends today, it is important to keep the socio-cultural environment in which they were created alive in people’s minds. With the special exhibition “Today I bake, tomorrow I brew“, the Bocholter Crafts museum, together with Zeitsprünge e.V., will bring both the craft workplaces and the legendary figures to new life. The museum, with its historical charm, the small, winding houses and the many lovingly furnished workshops, is predestined for this exhibition.
For the 800th anniversary of Bocholt’s city rights in 2022, the museum will take young and old into a fantastic world that has been familiar since childhood: Figures created according to historical models enliven the various rooms of the handicraft museum and illuminate the supernatural side of fairy tales. Visitors immerse themselves deeply into the past and learn not only interesting facts about old handicrafts and their connection to fairy tales, but also especially about Bocholt’s world of legends and the historical personalities behind it, such as Israhel van Meckenem and Clemens Brentano.
