Sem: Unity

Sem: Unity
Sem: Unity

regenerated nylon yarn derived from pre and post industrial waste, wire
(fabric sponsored by Carvico)
site specific installation, variable dimensions (installation view at Ivy Brown Gallery, NYC)
2022

 

The site-specific installation is dedicated to the root √Sem and tells
its verbal filiation starting from the concept of unity, as the title makes clear: Sem: Unity. The body of the artwork is made by rows of words belonging to different languages – from Latin to Armenian, from English to Sanskrit – and generated from a single root full of meanings that flank each other.
Equality, identity, symmetry, appearance, permanence and immediacy, unification and loneliness, simplicity and quietude are the various aspects of unity used in the work to tell, through words, the ways it assumes in the world starting from √Sem.

roots project, fiber art, textile art, sem, unity
ARTWORK-1_full-view-front-2_courtesy-Ivy-Brown-Gallery
unity

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 – says 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.

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.

 

fiber art, textile art, text art, books, contemporary arts, contemporary art gallery