These very first days of 2023 find me chewed up and spat out, yet somehow inexplicably alive after the year that just ended. I spent months fighting with myself until, just a few days ago, I finally identified the wound from which I’ve been bleeding. Now all that’s left is to look closely at this pain, to know it, embrace it, and come to terms with it.
This journey has been softened by many beautiful things around me. First and foremost, by family and friends—the people who love you for who you are and believe in you even when you fall and cry. Then rhythm, something I learned from my Steiner school years, has been essential. It grounds you, shields you from storms. And smells, which, more and more as time goes by, make it clear to me that time itself is nothing but an illusion. The smell of new toys. Of arguments. Of intermissions. The smell of seven o’clock in the evening—the calm energy of rest, of coming home, of conversations with loved ones.
And finally, by a wonderful gift the river has given me, as I keep learning to trust it more and more. Letting go, with relief, of that mania for control instilled in all of us since early childhood. A vital flow, which this time took the form of Barbara Pavan, curator and collector, present wherever in the world there is art connected to textiles of any kind.
One of my works, The Elephant Man, will be exhibited thanks to her incredible creative energy and organizational skill, together with the works of 23 other artists from different countries, in an international show titled Notes on This Time. The press release describes it like this:
“From these premises comes this exhibition, which—as the title suggests—is an exploration of our time, its contradictions, its victories and its defeats. A story entrusted to needle and thread, handed back to the viewer through the talent of artists committed to investigating its lights and shadows, confronting its challenges, and reading its many nuances. From political resistance to the new balances between humans and nature, from migration flows to propaganda, from illness to identity, from war to compulsive consumerism, embroidery here becomes, stitch by stitch, the lexicon to give voice to contemporaneity and to offer us a different vantage point on the reality that surrounds us.”
The exhibition will open on January 21 at 6 p.m. in a space that feels as if it were lifted straight from my dreams. It’s called CasermArcheologica and, since 2017, it has been housed in an ancient noble palace in the historic center of Sansepolcro, in the province of Arezzo. It is dedicated to contemporary art, artistic residencies, and social gatherings that primarily involve the local youth.
Those who oversaw the restoration of the Palazzo Muglioni rooms did so with rare sensitivity and intelligence. The decadence remains. The antiquity of the building is visible everywhere, and the contrast between the history of the place and the modernity of the art woven into it is striking—each empowering the other. I couldn’t have imagined a more beautiful place for my first embroidery exhibition. Or perhaps I did imagine it, many years ago, when I created a virtual gallery for the works of my previous life, set on the terrace of a Roman palace in San Giovanni.
To say I’m excited is an understatement. The exhibition will run until April 15. I can’t wait to meet the other textile artists and see their works on display. I hope to meet some of the people who follow my work there — I know many of them live outside Italy.
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