Here, indigo and cotton were weighed by the kilo.
What did a body in blue weigh?

“Who am I to define consciousness?”

Here, the cotton bale and the indigo meet, both carrying the deep wounds of transatlantic slavery, colonial territories, stolen knowledge, and enslaved people traded for industrial profit.
Indigo was used as currency a length of cloth was exchanged for a human body.
Cotton bears the same history: expansion, power, and trauma.
What did a body in blue weigh?
Indigo blue, once sacred.

The traces are woven into our landscape of colour and textile, into the Viskan River and the salts of the sea, into our epigenetic structures and collective memory.

For centuries, blue has been desired by the European elite.
Indigo, the powerful plant Indigofera tinctoria, was the hidden commodity of the slave trade, long before cotton and sugar.
Blue blurs borders and identity.

The machine presses brain, colour, and fabric into the same form: standardisation and control.
The brain, a universe of microscopic mirrors.
Biophotons: light bluer than indigo, moving coherently.

The first blue-dyeing house in Borås opened in 1695.
The indigo that dyed the city’s blue bore the marks of British colonial slavery in Bengal, India.
As blue dyers in Borås, they mastered the intricate art of dyeing with indigo, a craft deeply entwined with the microbial life that brought forth the blue colours.
This demanding labour often mirrored the conditions of a serf, and could be likened to a form of slavery.
The blue dyer, mastering the art of producing blue, thereby elevated his social status to that of an almost respected artist.

Yet this prestigious position came at a high price: the dyer remained bound to his master.
If anything happened to the dye vat, the dye master was held personally responsible for the precious blue pigment and forced to bear the financial burden of any mistake.

In many cultures, and historically, it was women in menopause who were entrusted with the blue’s complex, living colour processes bacterial, liminal, balancing between life and death.