Antonella Fiorillo: HANDLING DOWN – the thread as a language
Curated by di Marco Agostini
Opening: July 29, 2021, 8.00pm
Museo delle Stanze del Tempo e dell’Amore – Belvedere M.mo (CS)
July 29 – August 27 2021
h. 4pm /12am
The exhibition presents the artistic production developed in recent years by Antonella Fiorillo, who sees its fulcrum in the thread as a language that has a close correlation between history, time, story and writing.
Antonella Fiorillo, Il tesoro di Alarico
Antonella Fiorillo was born in Belvedere Marittimo (Cosenza), where she learned the art of sewing as a child. She moved to Rome in 2012, where she researches and defines her artistic path by studying Visual Arts and subsequently Art for Therapy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. She has participated in various exhibitions since the early Roman years: at the Pietro Canonica Museum in Villa Borghese, the Dioscuri Theater at the Quirinale, the Flyer Art Gallery, the Temple University, the Pio Sodalizio dei Piceni Monumental Complex, to name a few.
In 2019 she participates in the RAW (Rome Art Week) with the video installation “Guardaepostaascolta“; in May 2020 she participates with “What’s normal?” in the collective organized for the Basaglian Days at the former Asylum of Santa Maria della Pietà and, for the same occasion, in 2021, participates with “And what does the park write?”.
In these last works a more sensitive gaze and a new perspective are evident; in fact, it employs the use of sewing, while maintaining a common thread with the works of previous years: the desire to obtain, through the creation of the work, a moment of reflection and contact with issues that can and must be handed down through observing the other, listening, collecting memories so as to stop time through the artistic act and make it accessible and eternal. Works such as “RAIN-BOW” are born, a temporary installation on the Lungomare di Belvedere Marittimo, which in 2018 saw the artist work 7400 m of colored wool threads; or as “Synesthesia” a project born in the quarantine of 2020 and which has marked every single day of quarantine and in which the thread describes perceptions, moods and sensations experienced in a period of lockdown, illness and subsequently therapy and rebirth.
Antonella Fiorillo, Tramandare
“Handling down” is a project that involves ‘the artist’s thread’ combined with that of the people who first drew from their memory and then from their homes and donated small pieces of fabric they were particularly fond of or had for them a meaning, a story, its own memory – near or far.The artist sewed these small 6×10 cm fragments together one after the other. recording or writing the story in the meantime. Each was then transcribed by hand into a handcrafted book. Memory is therefore transformed into cotton to be spun, to stretch between stories to weave lives.They are stories that speak of people, relationships, suffering, joy, regrets, collected in a choral and participatory work that makes them immortal, not subject to fade over time, to get lost in memory. With needle and thread, Antonella Fiorillo sews textures of fabrics and experiences and makes their memories indelible.
