Une brève histoire de fils

The Maison de l'Amérique latine is pleased to present the exhibition "A Brief History of Threads" which will be held in Paris, from October 10, 2024 to January 16, 2025. Proposed by the exhibition curator Domitille d'Orgeval, it brings together 17 artists from Latin America, now recognized on the international scene, whose works, created between the 1960s and the present day, focus on thread, weaving, braiding and knotting. These practices, anchored in vernacular traditions of Latin America, refer to distant memories, to archetypes that have shaped the human experience across cultures and generations. Take the example of the Kogi Indians in Colombia for whom the thread, truly sanctified, "represents the magical union between the temporal and the spiritual, the instant and eternity, the human and the divine" (Manuel Hormaza). In the Inca culture, we can also mention the quipus or devices made of cords forming knots used to encode a multitude of information, ranging from agricultural statistics to historical accounts. Finally, in the Western imagination, the thread is at the heart of great mythological stories such as that of the Fates, Ariadne or Penelope, where it symbolizes human destiny, the saving path and unfailing love.

Artists: Kenia Almaraz Murillo, Olga de Amaral, Milton Becerra, Inés Blumencweig, Iván Contreras Brunet, Elias Crespin, Jorge Eielson, Vanessa Enríquez, Sidival Fila, Gego, Martha Le Parc, Anna Maria Maiolino, Sandra Monterosso, Laura Sánchez Filomeno, Jesús Rafael Soto, Cecilia Vicuña, Natalia Villanueva Linares.

In the exhibition "A Brief History of Threads", the artists use all kinds of threads, fibers and textile materials (plant, synthetic, human, animal) to create works of a very varied nature (reliefs, videos, mobiles, tapestries, hangings, in situ installations), some of which were specifically designed for the exhibition. This diversity testifies to the metamorphic power of thread which, through its capacity to de-hierarchize, hybridize, and mix know-how and mediums, becomes a tool for critical investigation allowing the exploration of new cultural, identity, but also political and environmental territories. A story that begins in the 1950s and 60s with the Venezuelan actors attached to the kinetic movement, Gego and Soto. The latter seized upon metal threads to escape modernist flatness and create a continuum between the work and the viewer. It continues today with artists such as Vanessa Enríquez, Sandra Monterosso Laura Sánchez Filomeno, Natalia Villanueva Linares and Kenia Almaraz Murillo who have turned to thread, and through it, weaving and embroidery to integrate these ancestral practices into the field of contemporary art in a new way.