This essay reflects on the exhibition Textile Manifeste – Von Bauhaus bis Soft Sculpture at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich and examines textiles as autonomous artistic and cultural forms. Approaching the exhibition through questions of materiality, visibility, and curatorial framing, the text explores how fabrics operate as sites of memory, resistance, and embodied knowledge.

Focusing on spatial design, colour, and the deliberate prohibition of touch, the essay reads the exhibition as a choreography of distance and intimacy. Textiles—often dismissed as decorative or functional—are analysed here as political and feminist statements that challenge hierarchies between art, craft, and everyday practice.

Situating the exhibition within broader debates in museum studies and material culture, the text asks how institutions produce value, whose forms of making are recognised as art, and how slowness, tactility, and gendered labour are re-framed through exhibition design.