Threads are great metaphors for human beings: a thread is something simple and basic, but, united with other threads, it can create wonderful textiles and even tapestries. In more or less the same way, human beings can do great things when they team up together. But a thread could also be intended as a symbol for the logical thread we have lost or we are determined to regain in the confusingly dark times we are living in. That's why the exhibition currently on at the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci) in Prato, Italy, is particularly apt for the times we are living in.
Curated by Camilla Mozzato and Marta Papini, "Protext! Quando il tessuto si fa manifesto" (Protext! When Fabric Becomes a Manifesto, through 14 February 2021) looks at threads, fabrics and textiles creating a complex language, a semantic of politics and protest.
Textile art, embroidering or crocheting have often been filed in the past under the craft category, but, since the '70s there have been artists who elevated these techniques and materials, at times combining them with other disciplines and infusing in them very different meanings.
"Protext!" takes this discourse forward, reframes and recontextualises a variety of issues, from identity and labour to environmental changes, using textiles as a medium to tackle contemporary and social problems.
The event features works by a group of international artists - Pia Camil, Otobong Nkanga, Tschabalala Self, Marinella Senatore, Serapis Maritime Corporation, Vladislav Shapovalov and Güneş Terkolusing - who employ textiles in their practice.
"Protext" opens with a site-specific environment by the Greek collective Serapis Maritime Corporation, a wall painting sprayed on a tent that expands over the walls of the venue and a pile of cuscions made with recycled materials with fashion and design images selected from the Serapis and Manteco archives and hinting at the physical relation between man and labour.
Two large textile sculptures entertain a dialogue with this installation - "Bara, Bara, Bara" and "Vicky's Blue Jeans Hammock", both by Pia Camil. The artist made them sewing together second hand yellow and orange shirts and jeans made in Latin America for retailers and organisations in the United States that found their way back to the street markets of Iztapalapa, Mexico City.
By inhabiting Camil's pieces or moving around these works that look like sails blowing in the wind or like the tarpaulin tents stretched over market stalls ("Bara, Bara, Bara" hints indeed at the street vendors' cry in Mexico City; "bara" is short for "barato", cheap), visitors populate and activate them, becoming part of the artist's research and study about globalisation.
Through her textile sculptures inspired by Lygia Pape's seminal 1968 performance "Divisor" (in which community members of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil were invited to walk together through the city connected by an enormous piece of white fabric which each participant popped their head through), Camil ponders indeed about the way garments and textiles travel back to their places of origins following the global trade routes.
Otobong Nkanga's tapestries "The Leftlovers", "Infinite Yeld", "In Pursuit of Bling: The Discovery" and "Steel to Rust", look instead at social and topographical changes and at the historical impact and collective memory in the relationship between man and nature.
The artist looks at this relation also through tapestries of minerals that, the artist hopes, will make people ponder about how these materials are extracted from nature.
The minerals in these tapestries are cut into sections and the human figures accompanying them seem to have gone through the same sectioning process, becoming almost abstract figures. By representing inanimate minerals and human beings in the same way, the artist symbolises a deep connection between living creatures and the landscapes and the environments in which they move.
Vladislav Shapovalov's flags try to give an identity to the many factory workers from textile manufacturing plants. Shapovalov's flags were created after a research at the Centro di Documentazione della Camera del Lavoro di Biella, an Italian city with a rich textile industry similar to Prato's.
Two flags on display here dating from 1962 were made sewing together small pieces of fabrics on which the names of the women workers from a textile factories were embroidered. They were made as symbolical objects to be exchanged between two different factories before one of them closed down. When we talk about workers, we consider them as an anonymous collective of people, but these flags attempt to give back an identity to each woman, while calling to mind the workers' movements from the '60s and the '70s.
Women are also the protagonists of Güneş Terkol's tapestries in which materials are combined together to tell stories. These women refuse to adapt themselves to the social and cultural transformations in contemporary Turkey. Sewing becomes an act of resistance, it is a way to tell stories that may be left untold. Terkol's "The Dreams on the River" and "Desire Passed by Band" were made during a collective workshop, while "Bridge the Gap" was created during a collaborative event at the Centro Pecci with Prato-based anti-violence centre La Nara.
And there's more to see in Tschabalala Self's and Marinella Senatore's works. Self explores black identity sewing, printing and painting coloured materials and fabrics from Harlem-based shops in her compositions, creating paintings made following the artisanal traditions she acquired as she watched her mother sewing clothes for her and her siblings when she was a child.
Senatore's drawings and hand-embroidered coloured banners represent instead an exploration of community groups with symbols such as flags and banners of associations from the South of Italy, of Latin American political carnivals and British trade unions.
The exhibition closes with a room dedicated to a workshop: the museum plans to develop here events about the use of fabrics to dissent and in this space the duo About A Worker (Kim Hou and Paul Boulenger) will present a collection made during a collective workshop with a group of students from Florence.
While for the Centro Pecci this exhibition is a way to strengthen the connection between its work and the local territory, its texile history and traditions, for visitors who will get the chance to walk around the installations, "Protext!" will represent an introduction to the potential of fabrics and textiles to tell stories and bring forth strong and powerful messages.
Image credits for this post
Installation views "Protext! Quando il tessuto si fa manifesto", Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy © photo OKNOstudio
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