Il racconto del filo. Cucito e ricamo nell'arte contemporanea

Today embroidery and needlework - components of an ancient and widely practiced craft but one that has always been kept shut up within the walls of the home, relegated to the role of mere handiwork and above all to the world of women - are means of expression often used in art, the mark of a research that goes beyond a question of individual preference.
An unexpected artistic medium that replaces the brush with a search for "alternative" supports and materials and finds a link with the cutting and pasting that is normally done on the computer. A choice of language that not only breaks down - as has happened in previous important experiences - the barrier separating so-called highbrow materials from those considered lowbrow, but also proposes a new relationship between the sexes, given the blatant recourse - on the part of both men and women - to a traditionally female set of symbols. A means of expression that takes on a "political" value, overturning clichés, drawing attention to what is usually marginal, subverting the rhythms of communication to which modern society has accustomed us, "retying the threads" of broken identities, reassessing a way of thinking that is deliberately not centered on the word.
The volume, which accompanies the original exhibition at the MART, sets out to investigate this now autonomous language, proposing a selection of the male and female artists who over the last decade, and all over the world, have chosen needle and thread to create their images. They come from profoundly different geographical, cultural and geopolitical backgrounds: Europe, the countries of the East, Japan, the United States, Central and South America, the Arab countries.
The central figure and beating heart of the exhibition is Alighiero Boetti (died in 1994), the great exponent of Arte Povera who was the first to make constant use of embroidery as a medium: who can forget the famous tapestries he commissioned from Afghan women, resorting to the "exchange of hand?" Boetti is represented by seven important works from the time when he first started to use embroidery.
A total of thirty-two artists have been selected (over half of them presenting a work created specially for the occasion), with many names that have by now established an international reputation: from Rosemarie Trockel, who in the mid-eighties initiated an important shift in the figurative development of the last two decades, giving voice to perceptions that had previously remained confined to the private experience of women, to Tracey Emin, the provocative British artist who attracted so much attention in 1997 at the exhibition Sensation held at London's Royal Academy of Art in London, claiming the right to talk about her own love affairs and sexuality; from Mona Hatoun - who was born and lived in Beirut and then moved to London to escape the civil war in Lebanon - weaving keffiyeh out of woman's hair (present at Rovereto along with others) and highlighting the role of women in art and political protest, to Francesco Vezzoli, Mike Kelley and Eva Marisaldi.