A collection in a bag, a collection to unpack.

Edwina Hörl has put together a new type of collection that places the act of “collecting” at center stage. In her “one-bag-collection” she reflects on the idea of assembling pieces of clothing and presenting them together. The focus is on the act of collecting, the source of the word “collection.” In her new series, the spotlight is not just on the individual garments forming a whole—it presents the activity of collecting as a shared endeavor linking people within a community.
In her “one-bag-collection”, Edwina Hörl puts together clothing references from various geographical and cultural regions into a single bag. She combines techniques, materials, and motifs into her design language—Japanese knitting and dyeing methods, handwoven Indian cotton fabrics and print designs, and even German shoemaking craftsmanship. The bag thus becomes a sort of container for the collection’s curated set of engaging choosable objects, serving as an invitation to view each item within a context and as part of a greater whole, and thus to reflect on one’s own patterns of choosing and consuming.
Edwina Hörl draws on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), who considered the carrier bag the decisive tool in human history—not weapons, the spear. With this perspective, Le Guin challenged traditional male-centered hero myths by offering narratives rooted in community. She saw the collective gathering of fruits, berries, medicinal herbs, etc., to be the true means through which communities sustained themselves and ensured their own survival. In this feminist retelling of technological history, Le Guin pairs the act of collecting with storytelling as a tool for shaping the world, in an effort to disrupt patriarchal, hero-driven narratives. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, survival is a communal achievement: all members of the group contribute, rather than a single heroic hunter or warrior who feeds and protects the rest. Le Guin dismantles the hero as an exalted figure of salvation, redemption, or origin—along with the myths and narratives that glorify him.
It was not weapons for hunting and warfare that were essential to community and life, but the bag, which was used to gather food, warming materials, medicinal plants, and more. In this view, the group as a collective becomes the protagonist of the narrative, not the male warrior figure. In her book, Le Guin describes how she could never relate to the traditional heroic figures in conflict-driven tales, but found herself reflected in the character and narrative stance of the gatherer. A crucial point for her is that in the conceptual worlds of collected objects and subjects, binary opposites begin to dissolve: good and evil, culture and nature, male and female, human and more-than-human, etc.
Ursula Le Guin—and later Donna Haraway—highlight how our reality is shaped by narratives and mythologies, and how urgently we need reconfigured stories to imagine new worlds. Haraway refers to this as “worlding”: a fusion of world and word, of material, meaning and world-building. Edwina Hörl’s approach can also be understood in this sense: her collections consistently aim to view matter and meaning as inseparable. They weave together textiles, design, and narrative into one interconnected whole.
What objects do we collect? And what stories do we tell through them? Are they stories about ourselves or about a community? Do they reproduce patriarchal narrative structures, or do they gather material for imagining new realities through non-binary storytelling?
The carrier bag and its collected contents symbolize the connection between matter and meaning, their inseparable weaving together. But the bag also embodies everyday stories, stories that define our world. It is not merely a container of personal memories, but a vessel of cultural history. Here, collecting does not refer to the accumulation of consumer goods, but to a form of coexistence that transcends difference. It offers a life-affirming counter-narrative to the conflict-driven tale of the hero.
The collection in the carrier bag is telling cultural stories about community. Carrying garments—both in a bag and on the body—becomes a performative act, a shared form of storytelling. When bags are opened, worlds unfold.

Sabine Winkler
Translation from the original German: Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek