2017

110 × 163 cm h

Materials: Canvas – cords – cotton thread – cotton padding – wooden frameTechnique: Digital printing on canvas – stitching and knots

“Fragments of Memory”, like pieces of a puzzle, reconstruct the story of those women and men who worked in the textile industry during one of its most tragic events: the collapse of the factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013.               I wanted to represent in it the entire history of hardship and suffering of the female and male textile workers who lived and sacrificed their lives at the looms. Each fragment is connected to the next through an intricate weave of threads and cords, like indissoluble paths of Life and History.                             The digital printing on canvas heightens the evocative process of both the images and the elaborated canvas pieces. It gives them equal value, both as testimony to the events and as remembrance. In some fragments, the images emerge, become blurred and tell their story; in others, time and pain have sewn and re-sewn the canvas like skin marked by deep scars. They bear the marks, stories and voices of those who wove it through suffering. It is an evocative work in the power of its representation, transforming images into sensory stimuli.

On 24 April 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight-storey commercial building, collapsed in Savar, a sub-district in the Greater Dhaka Area, the capital of Bangladesh. Rescue and search operations ended on 13 May, with 1,129 victims. Approximately 2,515 injured people were rescued alive from the building.

It is considered the deadliest accident ever to have occurred in a textile factory, as well as the most lethal accidental structural failure in modern human history. The building housed several garment factories, a bank, apartments and numerous other shops. When cracks were noticed in the building, the shops and bank on the lower floors were closed, while the warning to avoid using the building was ignored by the owners of the textile factories. The workers were in fact ordered to return the following day, when the building gave way, collapsing during the morning rush hour.