Artist: Marion Baruch, Leda Bourgogne, Cato Løland, Cezary Poniatowski, Leonardo Meoni
Exhibition title: Uncertain Weavings
Curated by: Micol Teora
Venue: The Address, Brescia, Italy
Date: September 30 – November 26, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Address, Brescia
The first memory I have regarding this city is a story that my grandmother, who was born in Brescia, told me. More than a memory, perhaps, it is an image and it comes to mind only after a few weeks working on this exhibition. At the end of the war, women of the neighborhood secretly met in my grandmother’s house. Silently, they sewed together scraps of fabric, shreds of what once existed, to make new clothes for the partisan forces. Between the flaps, small notes, brought by their beloved ones, were pinned waiting to be found.
Fabric’s wave is the first writing of humanity: the threads that intertwine are a primitive alphabet for writing a story as old as the world. The mythical genealogies are marked by the parthenogenic goddesses, created by themselves, all weavers.
A thread is unrolled to release the monstrous into reality, another time it is woven and then unraveled to build the illusion of a perpetual wait and postpone tomorrow to a later day.
The thread often takes on a healing symbolism, sutures fragments, deceives distances and forces different belongings into easily destructible constraints. The fabric protects the body but marks its threshold, a fragile limit that pollutes the corners of the world, which doesn’t know what to do with what has just passed.
The same fate awaits the stories that the fabric brings with it, whether it was born waste or it became later. The hands that touched it, the lives it welcomed are lost; the void that comes to life within itself determines its end.
Uncertain Weavings lives within the tension between the generative force of antiquity and the desolate contemporary scenario.
The exhibition investigates the multiple possibilities that fabric as a material offers, together with the profound intrinsic narratives linked to it. The uncertainty, suggested by the title, lies in the physical condition of the fabric, constantly vulnerable to movement and in the relentless potential for disintegration that it conceals.
Uncertain Weavings is not an exhibition about fabric, but a reflection on its implicit character, on the tension that gives life to the weave, always poised between persistence and disintegration.
The selected artists bring fabric scraps to the center of the process on which they intervene through different techniques and processes. They reveal interpretations and approaches to the potential that the material represents and embodies, giving shape to the strength that insinuates itself into the fragility of the shreds.
The works are born in a dialogue that breathes between space and matter; they live as an attempt to coexist with what surrounds the fabric: the body, the stories, the void.
