The exhibition gives an outline of the languages and cultures of weaving via an unprecedented dialogue between a collection of textile works from the museum’s historic collections—some hardly ever or by no means exhibited earlier than—and works by the artist Isabella Ducrot (Naples, 1931), who attracts her inspiration and humanist essence from textiles.

The artist was invited by the Museo delle Civiltà to discover, in partnership with the establishment’s curators, the heritage of garments, equipment, ceremonial or on a regular basis materials saved in showcases and storage rooms. From prehistoric archaeology to Italian folks arts/traditions and the methods of thought, symbolism, narratives and rituals of African, American, Asian and Oceanian cultures, the textile collections are a number of the museum’s most fascinating and, on the identical time, fragile displays, which is why they’re additionally probably the most hardly ever exhibited. The imaginative and prescient of this artist, who has labored for many years on textile cultures from everywhere in the world, has offered the museum with a chance to be noticed from the skin, revealing numerous hyperlinks between the heritage it preserves and the work of an artist for whom textiles are usually not simply an strange materials however a centuries-old technique of expression and communication between totally different intervals in historical past, 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 options an elaborate and intensive collection of clothes, artefacts and even simply easy strips of material that pay testimony to how a material, greater than being a purposeful or ornamental component, is primarily a rigorous bodily construction that manifests itself as an genuine language in its personal proper that human beings have used to recount the spiritual, civil, particular person and collective historical past of their cultures. The textiles on show, which come from all of the museum collections, not solely inform the story of the progressive formation of its encyclopaedic assortment, but additionally doc the museum’s institutional relations with the assorted cultures being examined. So, this part of the exhibition the type of a kind of travelogue via area and time and a self-analysis of the museum’s historical past interwoven into the weft and warp of its textiles collections. The exhibition shows some extraordinarily fragmentary textiles from Prehistoric Collections relationship again to the Bronze Age and from 19^th century excavations at Lake Biel in Switzerland, along with textiles made in Ethiopia and Congo within the late 19^th and early 20^th century taken from the African Arts and Cultures Collections, textiles from the American Arts and Cultures Collections, the pre-Columbian period via to the 20^th century, and even examples of Polynesian tapa (a particular sort of material created from strips of tree bark) and the Oceanian Arts and Cultures Collections, which collectively doc all of the supplies, kinds and methods developed over millennia by indigenous individuals to satisfy their social, financial and religious wants. The exhibition notably showcases textiles from the Asian Arts and Cultures Collections starting from Himalayan artefacts to a luxurious Chinese language silk satin cloth with a dragon sample relationship again to the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and, lastly, work garments and festive clothes for on a regular basis put on borrowed from the Common Arts and Traditions Collections, principally made between the top of the 19^th and the 20^th century and first displayed on the  Worldwide Exhibition held in Rome in 1911.

Isabella Ducrot considers textiles to be a palimpsest on which human historical past and all its numerous private tales is deposited; tangible traces of intangible cultures, an solely ‘seemingly silent’ traveller from one tradition to a different, a medium renouncing uniqueness to disclose the intelligence and sensitivity of the communities to which they belong, creating contact with others and the hope of contact with the divine. Just like the women and men explorers who created the textiles collections belonging to the Museo delle Civiltà, Ducrot has been on the transfer for a few years, creating a set that she has fastidiously folded away within the drawers of a wardrobe and, above all, assembling a multiplicity of works during which cloth is at all times the principle participant and by no means only a supporting actor. The curators of this part of the exhibition – Anna Mattirolo and Andrea Viliani along with Vittoria Pavesi—have, for the very first time, introduced collectively the historic textiles collections of a public museum and the artist’s personal analysis, treating them as a celebration of a data and understanding of textiles that’s each summary and concrete, intimate and shared. What fascinates the artist about textiles isn’t their ornament however the compositional relationship between historical past and construction; the truth that textiles are a “advanced artefact whose invention dates again to legendary intervals in human historical past;” the way in which they doc the “tastes, aesthetic guidelines, migrating indicators, and visual/tactile proof of a given tradition”. In the midst of her travels and analysis over a few years, the artist has grow to be very accustomed to textile supplies, discovering particulars with symbolic worth in all of them. For her, a kind of textile is, due to this fact, one thing impalpable however in its personal manner radical: “virtually nothing, troublesome to explain on account of a scarcity of adjectives, no colors, no patterns, no embroidery, simply an affirmation of its personal essence, simplicity decreased to the naked minimal and but grand and shifting, like a patriotic hymn.” Ducrot has continued to gather and work on textiles for years, recomposing distinctions and oppositions, recomposing items of textile into new kinds and new works, liberating the materials she makes use of from their authentic functions to remodel them into technique of artistry. Over time, textiles and weaving have grow to be the main focus of her passionate work, with interpretations and insights revealing what lies past simply the fabric itself.

Bringing collectively African, American, Asian, European and Oceanian works from the museum’s textiles collections—works which can be worthwhile and sophisticated, easy and humble, historical or trendy, intact or in items—in addition to inserting the works of different artists alongside their very own, this exhibition and artist invite us on one other journey via area and time. By incorporating so many different tales into his personal story, Ducrot’s journey and self-analysis grow to be these of the museum itself . . . testimonies from different ages and geographical places, cultures and pure settings, tales of individuals and tales of collections/museums. . . an infinite weave of  ancestral connective tissue enabling us to say that— quoting a passage from a poem by Patrizia Cavalli devoted to Ducrot’s textile works after which the exhibition is known as—“to weave is human.”

Curated by Anna Mattirolo, Andrea Viliani con Vittoria Pavesi 

at Museo delle Civiltà, Rome
till February 16, 2025