INSIDE cycle
2020
100 × 150 cm
Canvas sewn with cords on a frame. Digital print. Ready-made.
Dedicated to the mothers of all children who died at sea, in hostile lands, killed by the senselessness of humankind.
The grieving mother stood
weeping beside the Cross
on which her Son hung.
And her grieving soul,
sorrowful and afflicted,
was pierced by a sword.
…………………………
Who would not weep
upon seeing the Mother of Christ
in such torment?
Who would not grieve
upon contemplating the pious Mother,
sorrowful beside her Son?”
(text by Jacopone da Todi, taken from Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater)
This work was born from the horror I felt at the utter indifference, not only to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young people, but also to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of families, of mothers. In this work, pain is treated as a news report. It is a narrative exploded into fragments, bound together by the necessity of telling the story. I use digital printing on canvas to emphasize its cold and impersonal character. Were it not for the intervention of sewing, knotting, embroidery and weaving, it would inevitably remain removed from the empathetic and emotional involvement of the viewer. Each fragment bears witness to a lived experience, moments of everyday female life, testimony to a waiting, to hundreds of wounds inflicted by a forced distance and sewn and re-sewn day after day. Until the final explosion. The loss of a child, who becomes, in the narrative of the mass media, an impersonal number stripped of humanity. From a formal point of view, I was interested in finding a synergy between the modelling of the canvas and its digital reproduction. In some fragments I attempted a fusion of the two in a kind of trompe-l’œil, where the use of cord stitching realistically retraces what has been printed.
Textile Sculptures