Black
Years ago, I happened to watch “Black”, the first Indian movie I ever saw. All my prejudices about Indian movies blew away (during the successive years I have come to know all kinds of Indian movies and much enjoyed several more of them) as I savoured a magnificent celebration of the human will and of the power to go beyond the normally accepted assertion of what “life” is or is accepted to be.
Black is a series of works that I have first conceived during my residency at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and that is deeply related to my artistic practice. Embroidery is a tactile experience, and during the past few years I have started to work on paper, using newspapers, photographs and watercolour papers as a canvas for threads.
The use of braille, as a written language is quickly disappearing, just like other languages and cultural manifestations pertaining to minorities.
This series is inspired by the idea of blindness and the extent that it has in our world. Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a draft paper, I have translated the 30 articles of the declaration in braille, embroidering the text in a black thread on 30 black canvases.
Humankind is blind in front of the violations of the Human rights, or it pretends to be, which could be even worst and more difficult to accept.
On the other side, it is necessary to touch with one’s hand, to re-write, to read once again with meditative, focused attention the articles, in order to deeply understand them.
The articles have not been reproduced in their entirety, rather they are partially re-written: all the passages containing sentences referring to duties have been removed from the transc<x>ript. Only the rights have place in this context.
Can the audience see the partiality of the transc<x>ription? That would presume a deep knowledge of the original text, otherwise being impossible to recognise any distortion of the text or abstraction from its complete expression.
Similarly, our experience of the world is partially responsible, meaning that we depend on the sources of information that twist the reality, acting as the “text”, and that translate it in different forms, partially both as “not integrally” and “sided”. But there is also a sort of blindness to which we do willingly succumb, a comfort zone that allows us to see what we want to see and to ignore anything else which wouldn’t fit in the frame.
Black is a series of works that I have first conceived during my residency at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and that is deeply related to my artistic practice. Embroidery is a tactile experience, and during the past few years I have started to work on paper, using newspapers, photographs and watercolour papers as a canvas for threads.
The use of braille, as a written language is quickly disappearing, just like other languages and cultural manifestations pertaining to minorities.
This series is inspired by the idea of blindness and the extent that it has in our world. Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a draft paper, I have translated the 30 articles of the declaration in braille, embroidering the text in a black thread on 30 black canvases.
Humankind is blind in front of the violations of the Human rights, or it pretends to be, which could be even worst and more difficult to accept.
On the other side, it is necessary to touch with one’s hand, to re-write, to read once again with meditative, focused attention the articles, in order to deeply understand them.
The articles have not been reproduced in their entirety, rather they are partially re-written: all the passages containing sentences referring to duties have been removed from the transc<x>ript. Only the rights have place in this context.
Can the audience see the partiality of the transc<x>ription? That would presume a deep knowledge of the original text, otherwise being impossible to recognise any distortion of the text or abstraction from its complete expression.
Similarly, our experience of the world is partially responsible, meaning that we depend on the sources of information that twist the reality, acting as the “text”, and that translate it in different forms, partially both as “not integrally” and “sided”. But there is also a sort of blindness to which we do willingly succumb, a comfort zone that allows us to see what we want to see and to ignore anything else which wouldn’t fit in the frame.
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