Museo delle Civiltà, Rome
01 August 2024 - 16 February 2025
From 1 August 2024 to 16 February 2025 , at the Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari (Piazza Guglielmo Marconi 8, Rome) the Museo delle Civiltà presents WEAVING IS HUMAN. Isabella Ducrot… and the textile collections of the Museo delle Civiltà. The exhibition narrates the languages and cultures of weaving in an unprecedented dialogue between a selection of textile works from the museum’s historical collections – some rarely or never exhibited before – and the works of the artist Isabella Ducrot (Naples, 1931), who finds her inspiration and humanist essence in fabric.
The artist was invited by the Museo delle Civiltà to explore, together with the institution’s curators, the heritage of clothes, accessories, ceremonial or everyday fabrics that are kept in the display cases and in the warehouses. From prehistoric archaeology to Italian popular arts and traditions and to the systems of thought, symbols, narratives and rituals of African, American, Asian and Oceanian cultures , the textile collections are among the most fascinating and at the same time fragile of the Museo delle Civiltà, and for this reason they are also the most rarely exhibited. The gaze of the artist, who for decades has been dealing with textile cultures from all over the world, was an opportunity for the museum to be observed from the outside and discover countless points of connection between the heritage it holds and the practice of an artist for whom fabric is not only an everyday material but a millenary instrument of expression and communication between eras, territories and cultures.