'Lace Relations' Is Changing Everything We Thought We Knew About Lace

That was the feeling the moment the conversation about Lace Relations began, a documentary whose brilliance lies not only in what it reveals about textiles, but in what it forces us to confront about history, power, and the global movement of culture.

Fresh off its Nigerian premiere at the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History and its AFRIFF 2025 screening, the film has become its own conversation starter. 

In a hybrid interview setting, partly a shared discussion, partly intimate one-on-ones,  the filmmakers behind the 88-minute documentary brought to light the world beneath the Lace.

The team, comprising Anette Baldauf, Joana Adesuwa Reiterer, Chioma Onyenwe, and Katharina Weingartner, collectively transformed a mere fabric history into something bold and necessary.

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A Film About Fabric and More

The documentary begins in the seemingly quiet Austrian town of Lustenau, once a thriving lace powerhouse. But lace doesn’t end in Europe. Its story continues loudly in Lagos, where fabrics are more than adornment. They represent identity, wealth, story, and status.

Lagos markets like Balogun and Tejuosho, with their layered hierarchies and coded negotiations, are living museums. And the film places them side by side with the pristine archives of Austria’s lace industry, asking a haunting question:

How did a European lace boom coincide with the death of West Africa’s indigenous textile industry?

This is where the documentary lands its emotional punch:  It makes visible the invisible machinery- colonial extraction, global capital, and cultural erasure that has long dictated what certain cultures gain and what others lose.

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“Lace is not just an adornment. It’s a map.” - Chioma Onyenwe

In the interview's creative mix, Chioma’s voice stood out. She describes lace as something far beyond fashion, noting how intimately it mirrors Nigeria’s cultural and social evolution.

“Lace is not just an adornment,” she said. “It’s a map of where we’ve been, and a vision of where we’re reclaiming power.”

Her direction anchors the Lagos side of the story, ensuring the film doesn’t slip into the trap of being about Nigeria without being from Nigeria. 

Anette Baldauf and Joana Adesuwa Reiterer brought the European perspective, one marked by questions rather than answers.

Anette, with the precision of someone who has spent years buried in archives, spoke about the importance of confronting forgotten industrial histories:

“We were interested in the silence,” she said. “Every archive has what is present, but its power lies in what is absent.”

Joana added a personal layer. As an Austrian-Nigerian artist, she is both an insider and an outsider in this story, a bridge who understands the weight of cultural displacement.

“You don’t only inherit wealth,” she noted. “You inherit the consequences of how that wealth was made.”

Together, their reflections reveal a Europe that has rarely asked itself why its lace museums are full while West Africa’s historic textile industries were left to collapse.

Katharina approaches the story like a provocateur. She explained that textiles have always been instruments of negotiation, dominance, and identity. Lace, in particular, carried social codes that people of different classes were expected to obey.

“Fabric has always been political,” she said. “People just don’t like to admit it.”

It’s a theme woven through the film: how a soft, delicate material becomes a symbol of economic conquest.

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The Music of Memory

The documentary’s sonic landscape, blending the sounds of King Sunny Ade, Niniola, and Austrian composer Bernd Fleischmann, mirrors the collision and convergence of histories.

It creates a rhythm that is at once local and global, intimate and expansive. A reminder that even sound carries colonised and decolonised echoes.

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A Cross-Continental Collaboration 

One of the most striking aspects of the interview was the creative team’s stance on responsibility. They did not treat this as a cultural exchange, but a cultural reckoning.

They insisted that Nigeria not be framed as a “site of extraction,” even in storytelling. Lagos wasn’t merely filmed; it was listened to. Market women weren’t “subjects,” they were collaborators.

Designers, historians, textile researchers, and cultural custodians were treated as keepers of knowledge, not “informants.” This approach is why Lace Relations feels less like a documentary and more like a restoration project.

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At the Heart of It All: Who Tells the Story?

Every director echoed the same sentiment in different words:

Stories about Africa must include African voices. Stories involving colonial histories must confront colonial power directly. Stories about textiles must honour the people whose hands have always done the labour.

And this ethos is what ultimately elevates Lace Relations beyond aesthetics.

Why This Documentary Matters Now

The global appetite for African art, culture, and fashion has never been stronger. But with every rising curve comes exploitation, misinterpretation, and erasure.

What this film does is slow us down. It forces us to look, really look, at how deeply our clothes, our markets, and our histories are intertwined with forces outside our control.

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