Roots Project

Roots is the name of the series of artworks dedicated to verbal roots. As often happens with our works, we started from a text and, specifically, from an essay by Elémire Zolla, Language and Cosmogony, which tells the story of Creation.

The link between word and creative act, particularly their relation at the basis of reality construction, is one of the main aspects of our research.

Trying to bring to light distant knowledges, forgotten but completely alive, in an increasingly frenetic world; trying to understand what binds us, especially in a historical moment in which language – and communication – is constantly at the center of attention and, at the same time, full of uncertainties and misunderstandings, is one of our major driving force.

Verbal roots are essential in their way of being, they are like small chest enclosing stories that go beyond history, which need neither dates nor places to be placed, because they are always present everywhere.

Words are coordinates of a map that goes back to the beginning of time, for an approach to creation, for an understanding of the world – when they aren’t exploited and propagandized and untied from facts, that is, forced to lie.

Language and cosmology – say Zolla – mirror each other, and with the series of artworks on verbal roots we want to tell the fantastic dynamism that characterizes them. Specifically, for the following artworks, we chose roots that are bearers of life.

Ker: Unity and Order
Imagination
Sem: Unity
Image
Increase
Imitation

Roots

In our work we try to go beyond history, making analogy and abstraction our basic tools, which have their preferred material in books and fabrics. Starting from an element like the texts that focus on evocation, that are a skeleton to which the reader applies his creativity, we can trigger communication, approach and say: come here.

 

Our goal is to create an image for the invisible or to say how to remember it. The choice of fabric has two reasons: the first and most immediate is that writing and fabric have common terms to explain their nature and functioning, they share the lexicon. The second reason is to be found in the world of symbols, more precisely in the relationship between space and time.

The fabric represents the non-permanent dwellings, the tents of the nomadic peoples who change the place where they live and move little by little. The texts are also characterized by the fact that they are enjoyed in sequence, word by word. The writing and the fabric are made for movement, the work of art is made to move away from those who created it and to lose the moment in which it was created.

Carvico and Jersey Lomellina is one of the largest eco friendly fabric companies and, since 2016, we have been supporting “Healthy Seas” an initiative founded in 2013 at the behest of Aquafil, Star Sock and the NGO Ghost Diving, three realities that share a common mission: cleaning our planet waters from pollution, including the ghost fishing nets which kill so many sea creatures. Healthy Seas boasts another two-fold objective:

  • collaborating with fishing communities to enforce preventive actions to reduce the pollution caused by discarded fishing nets and to find new solutions for disposing of them in a financially and environmentally sustainable way. Recycled nylon is a great resource in the eco-friendly fabrics sector;
  • running some training programs to promote the importance of more environmentally responsible choices.

In Hebrew, the root aman √ אמן means confidence, firmness, determination, stability, pillar and at the same time art, as well as amen, formula of immediacy – in a second – and conclusion, the same thing that happens with Here, as if a long finger is ready to point. In Proust and also in The Other Side by Kubin, the bell tower is a long finger, the finger of God.

The whisper invokes, and the invoking involves calling and at the same time that what is invoked is the fruit of trust. A trust in something stable and hidden, inexpressible and therefore something that can only be revealed or expressed through art, that is, through this circle of words and shapes that form a halo, quite reverent and strong with this Here.

At the heart of our fiber art work is this trust that is linked to the invisible, the hidden, the profound, to that which seems abstract because it is waiting for a name, and which requires an act of trust in order to be seen.

In the past, the figure of the blind man has been used to represent the one who no longer needs to see matter, and therefore eyes, because he is already beyond it; his eyes ignore the material world so that the supernatural and the universal can emerge. The blind man of Derrida or, on the contrary, Proteus, who sees the future in the deep darkness of the water.

The message transmitted from ear to ear creates a dynamic that leads the user to become creator and maker, mixing roles and creating an exchange that guarantees transmission, goes beyond repetition and finds its completion in transformation.

 

fiber art international contemporary fiber art