The exhibition provides an overview of the languages and cultures of weaving through an unprecedented dialogue between a selection of textile works from the museum’s historical collections—some rarely or never exhibited before—and works by the artist Isabella Ducrot (Naples, 1931), who draws her inspiration and humanist essence from textiles.
The artist was invited by the Museo delle Civiltà to explore, in partnership with the institution’s curators, the heritage of clothes, accessories, ceremonial or everyday fabrics kept in showcases and storage rooms. From prehistoric archaeology to Italian folk arts/traditions and the systems of thought, symbolism, narratives and rituals of African, American, Asian and Oceanian cultures, the textile collections are some of the museum’s most fascinating and, at the same time, fragile exhibits, which is why they are also the most rarely exhibited. The vision of this artist, who has worked for decades on textile cultures from all over the world, has provided the museum with an opportunity to be observed from the outside, revealing countless links between the heritage it preserves and the work of an artist for whom textiles are not just an ordinary material but a centuries-old means of expression and communication between different periods in history, lands and cultures.
The exhibition, curated by Francesca Manuela Anzelmo, Paolo Boccuccia, Gaia Delpino, Maria Luisa Giorgi, Laura Giuliano, Vito Lattanzi, Gabriella Manna, Loretta Paderni and Massimiliano Alessandro Polichetti features an elaborate and extensive selection of garments, artefacts and even just simple strips of fabric that pay testimony to how a fabric, more than being a functional or decorative element, is primarily a rigorous physical structure that manifests itself as an authentic language in its own right that human beings have used to recount the religious, civil, individual and collective history of their cultures. The textiles on display, which come from all the museum collections, not only tell the story of the progressive formation of its encyclopaedic collection, but also document the museum’s institutional relations with the various cultures being examined. So, this section of the exhibition the form of a sort of travelogue through space and time and a self-analysis of the museum’s history interwoven into the weft and warp of its textiles collections. The exhibition displays some extremely fragmentary textiles from Prehistoric Collections dating back to the Bronze Age and from 19th century excavations at Lake Biel in Switzerland, together with textiles made in Ethiopia and Congo in the late 19th and early 20th century taken from the African Arts and Cultures Collections, textiles from the American Arts and Cultures Collections, the pre-Columbian era through to the 20th century, and even examples of Polynesian tapa (a special type of fabric made from strips of tree bark) and the Oceanian Arts and Cultures Collections, which together document all the materials, styles and techniques developed over millennia by indigenous people to meet their social, economic and spiritual needs. The exhibition notably showcases textiles from the Asian Arts and Cultures Collections ranging from Himalayan artefacts to a sumptuous Chinese silk satin fabric with a dragon pattern dating back to the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and, finally, work clothes and festive garments for everyday wear borrowed from the Popular Arts and Traditions Collections, mostly made between the end of the 19th and the 20th century and first displayed at the International Exhibition held in Rome in 1911.
Isabella Ducrot considers textiles to be a palimpsest on which human history and all its countless personal stories is deposited; tangible traces of intangible cultures, an only ‘seemingly silent’ traveller from one culture to another, a medium renouncing uniqueness to reveal the intelligence and sensitivity of the communities to which they belong, creating contact with others and the hope of contact with the divine. Like the men and women explorers who created the textiles collections belonging to the Museo delle Civiltà, Ducrot has been on the move for many years, creating a collection that she has carefully folded away in the drawers of a wardrobe and, above all, assembling a multiplicity of works in which fabric is always the main player and never just a supporting actor. The curators of this section of the exhibition – Anna Mattirolo and Andrea Viliani together with Vittoria Pavesi—have, for the very first time, brought together the historical textiles collections of a public museum and the artist’s own research, treating them as a celebration of a knowledge and understanding of textiles that is both abstract and concrete, intimate and shared. What fascinates the artist about textiles is not their decoration but the compositional relationship between history and structure; the fact that textiles are a “complex artefact whose invention dates back to mythical periods in human history;” the way they document the “tastes, aesthetic rules, migrating signs, and visible/tactile evidence of a given culture”. In the course of her travels and research over many years, the artist has become very familiar with textile materials, finding details with symbolic value in all of them. For her, a type of textile is, therefore, something impalpable but in its own way radical: “almost nothing, difficult to describe due to a lack of adjectives, no colours, no patterns, no embroidery, just an affirmation of its own essence, simplicity reduced to the bare minimum and yet grand and moving, like a patriotic hymn.” Ducrot has continued to collect and work on textiles for years, recomposing distinctions and oppositions, recomposing pieces of textile into new forms and new works, freeing the fabrics she uses from their original purposes to transform them into means of artistry. Over time, textiles and weaving have become the focus of her passionate work, with interpretations and insights revealing what lies beyond just the material itself.
Bringing together African, American, Asian, European and Oceanian works from the museum’s textiles collections—works that are valuable and complex, simple and humble, ancient or modern, intact or in pieces—as well as placing the works of other artists alongside their own, this exhibition and artist invite us on another journey through space and time. By incorporating so many other stories into his own story, Ducrot’s journey and self-analysis become those of the museum itself . . . testimonies from other ages and geographical locations, cultures and natural settings, stories of people and stories of collections/museums. . . an endless weave of ancestral connective tissue enabling us to claim that— quoting a passage from a poem by Patrizia Cavalli dedicated to Ducrot’s textile works after which the exhibition is named—“to weave is human.”
Curated by Anna Mattirolo, Andrea Viliani con Vittoria Pavesi
at Museo delle Civiltà, Rome
until February 16, 2025
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