The project « A Thread Between Past and Future » dedicated to textile arts, promoted by the Associazione Culturale Penelope and the Municipality of Barberino di Mugello in collaboration with the Padre Ernesto Balducci Municipal Library, funded by the European Cultural Foundation of Amsterdam and the Cariplo Foundation for Italy, as part of The Europe Challenge 2024, which selected and supported 55 libraries and local European communities, takes off in June 2024.
To address the challenge of preserving and innovating textile arts, traditions, and knowledge still active among the women of the local community while engaging a broader audience and other generations, the project in Barberino di Mugello includes contemporary international Fiber and Textile Art interventions with two major initiatives.
On Saturday, June 15, 2024, at 5:00 PM, two international exhibition projects will be inaugurated in the Vangi Hall of Palazzo Pretorio (Piazza Cavour 36) in Barberino di Mugello (FI): SCRIPTA VOLANT and VERBA CREANT.
Paraphrasing the famous phrase by Caius Titus in the Roman Senate, now a popular proverb, SCRIPTA VOLANT is one of the three sections of this international project designed for Barberino di Mugello, with the Library as its exhibition hub. Six international contemporary artists – Cenzo Cocca, Chen Li, Rana Feghali, Florencia Martinez, Federica Patera and Andrea Sbra Perego, Yukoh Tsukamoto – from different origins, generations, and backgrounds have created works that intertwine text and weaving, literature and fiber art, demonstrating how writing has been (until today) a means to convey ideas, thoughts, and emotions beyond spatial and temporal limits, continuously linking humanity to its history and stories, its multiple identities, and the evolution of individuals within communities and societies in perpetual transformation. Weaving and warping are just two examples of terms from a common lexicon between two arts – textile and narrative – that have accompanied us since the dawn of civilization. SCRIPTA VOLANT refers to this property of words to create relational networks and, in particular, to the power of the written word to overcome otherness, to open a gap, even when it is derived from temporal or spatial disparity.
To the creative power of words – intertwined, woven, declined in a plurality of forms – to add to reality the echo of other and parallel, imaginary and imagined universes, VERBA CREANT is dedicated, an exhibition drawing sustenance from the words of books and their branching into infinite narrative paths that lead to as many journeys as there are readers. The works in this exhibition project are created through textile techniques (in or off loom) and/or using textile or ‘weavable’ materials, fibers of any type and nature, fabrics, scraps, threads, evoke, inspire, cite, or refer to literary texts – in different languages, in prose or poetry, sacred or profane, stories, novels, fairy tales, myths, essays. To the weaving and intertwining of book words, the fiber, textile, and embroidery art works exhibited in this course respond within the Library spaces, constituting a parallel but alternative journey inspired by the plurality of meanings each literary text holds within itself. Selected through an international call promoted by SCD Textile&Fiber Art Studio of Perugia, the works of Luciana Aironi, Jorgelina Alessandrelli, Brigitte Amarger, Pietrina Atzori, Silvia Beccaria, Einav Benzano, Béatrice Beraud, Susanna Cati, Michela Cavagna, Maria Anastasia Colombo, Cinzia Farina, Patrizia Benedetta Fratus, Gudrun Bartenberger-Geyer, Niina Hiltunen, Sofia Kapnissi, Anneke Klein, Roland Krutovs, Karolina Lizurej, Saba Najafi, Silvia Ongaro, Sonia Piscicelli Izn, Beata Prochowska, Emmanuelle Rapin, Susanna Sabiu, Aune Taamal will be exhibited.
Following this double event, as part of Un filo di… – an urban knitting event – on Saturday, June 22, 2024, at 4:00 PM, also at Palazzo Pretorio, the presentation of the participatory art intervention in artist residency by Monica Giovinazzi, IMMAGINA VOLA CREA, will involve the Barberino community in creating a collective work that will later be permanently displayed at the Municipal Library.
The entire project, curated by Barbara Pavan, is dedicated to the ability of words to create fantastic universes and possible or hypothetical realities in which to immerse oneself through reading and, by extension, to the evolution and contamination of this narrative in contemporary art. The intent is also to highlight the relationship between narrative construction and the artistic practice of fiber/textile art, as well as the common trait – shared by Writing and Art – of being tools to understand the world around us and to explore and imagine new territories, ideas, reflections, nuances beyond the perimeter of what is already known. Both represent elements of individual and collective growth of human beings and a testimony to the evolution of individuals, communities, and their time.
