A Nightmare Stitched in Thread: Britta Marakatt-Labba in Mainz

There is a particular kind of quiet in a gallery before anyone else arrives, and Britta Marakatt-Labba's work makes use of it. Her material is thread, worked in cotton, linen and wool, and the pieces at Kunsthalle Mainz are built at a scale that pulls you in close. I kept returning to one of them, Nightmare, standing in front of it long enough that the room around me disappeared.

Poems tend to arrive after that kind of looking rather than during it. The one below came out of Nightmare, and out of the uneasy feeling that the work had described something I recognised.

Rats move in circles,
disrupting the powerful sleepers
in the quiet of the dark.

NIBBLE NIBBLE

Symmetry takes form,
encircling the dreamers,
quite like a dream on a loop.

The sleeping beds look tender,
like little capsules
in sweet slumber.

Could they have been lucid dreaming,
half-aware of the circle forming,
of the terror drawing closer?

Oh, to see the cosy world you built
being destroyed brick by brick,
and not be able to move...

To wake and find the shape already fixed,
Isn't that the worst kind of nightmare,
the worst torture?

-Menorca C, @europediariesblog

What the poem is answering

Marakatt-Labba is a Sámi artist, and Stitched Tracks is her solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Mainz. The show draws together decades of work, with pieces dated from 1968 through to 2023. Across that span the subjects stay constant: Sámi history and mythology, environmental struggle, and the shifting contours of political authority.

Her compositions circle back to repetition, procession and circular symmetry. Figures line up, turn and repeat until the pattern starts to feel like an argument about how identity persists inside structures that try to define, contain or reshape it. Standing close, you can see how little is left to chance and how much is held back.

Why embroidery, and why it works

Thread is a slow medium, and the slowness shows. These are not decorative surfaces; the restraint reads as discipline, and the precision makes each panel feel like a record rather than an illustration. Embroidery turns into testimony here, carrying memory forward and quietly asserting presence in the face of historical and political pressure.

What the poem took from the work was the sense of a shape closing around people who cannot move. That is the nightmare the title promises, and the stitching makes it patient rather than loud.

Visiting

Where: Kunsthalle Mainz.

When: 30 January 2026 to 26 July 2026.

Details: opening times and any accompanying events are listed on the Kunsthalle Mainz website.

The verse above is by Menorca C, @europediariesblog.