Frammenti, 2024. Tapestries, linen and hemp. Photo credit: Atelier Versi Linien.
Serra Bassa
Frammenti (Fragments) is a textile installation based on absence as an evocative principle. Like Sappho's verses that have come down to us on fragments of papyrus - disconnected words, meaning by subtraction - it is the dialogue between oblivion and presence that gives form to the work. The reference to Sappho's Fragments is not intended here to recall the original meaning of the verses nor the sexual and political context in which they were written, but to take up their mode of reading. In fact, we find ourselves before a text that, in order to be understood, must inevitably come to terms with its own support made up of fullness and emptiness, of fragments and lacks.
This mode summons the intimate universe of each of its readers, who must reconstruct a personal atmosphere for themselves in order to understand. In the same way, the installation offers the viewer's gaze an open sense, building soft walls around him, made of light and missing pieces, among which he can identify his own voids, evoking meaning and intimate spaces. A hand-woven manuscript that in the interplay between natural light and textile fibre offers itself to multiple interpretations. Suggested narratives, woven with recovered yarns in relief on a linen warp. The work, composed of light linen and hemp tapestries, includes black linen inserts that sketch an incomplete abstract language recalling the ink of the original Fragments. The weaving work created for the occasion echoes the repetitive and sober methods of the American painter Agnes Martin, her slow and intimate practice in the relationship between support and rhythm, translated on a handloom into textile technique.
Iris Drouet
Iris Drouet is a French textile designer who set up her atelier in Italy in 2021. In the weaving process it is the work of the hands that informs the wanders of the mind and the drafting of a piece in a reciprocal movement. Handweaving, being rigorous in its planning and preparation, also allows for a wide range of improvisation during the making of a piece, unique in its manner and materiality - just the way it has been for centuries of skilled weavers, men or women, who were inventing and passing on designs and symbols in the folk realm. It becomes a sort of manuscript made of lines and colour, hence Versi Linien, a variety of lines.