Textilities … and Roses too

The Fondazione Antonio Ratti is pleased to present Textilities … and Roses Too, a group exhibition to mark the Foundation’s 30th anniversary and the centenary of the birth of its founder, the textile designer, entrepreneur and collector Antonio Ratti (1915–2002).

Textiles are sensual abstractions by linking tactile and optical properties, and embodying aesthetic as well as social and economic developments. Whereas in technical terms they are based on a binary structure (the intersection of threads), their characteristics (an appealing and analytical quality), emerge from complex, non-linear visual and material transfers across time and space. Antonio Ratti collected textiles—primarily samples, drawings and pattern books—as objects to study, as models to be copied, rearranged, reinterpreted and reproduced.

Approaching textiles through the lens of microhistory—a concept developed in the 1970s by a group of Italian historians as an analytical tool to probe (material and immaterial) matter—the exhibition reflects on reproduction by appropriating a method that aims to shift from a search for answers towards an attention to unexpected findings in order to subvert instituted hierarchies. Carlo Ginzburg’s(1) suggestion that “It is not the cult of fragment, it is the question we ask” opens up a relational field between art and textiles and introduces a critical condition of textility which has travelled through divers textures of making and thinking, crossing continents, forms of labour and media—technologies and hands.

A new display system devised by Florian Pumhösl (in collaboration with Walter Kräutler) is presented in a constellation of art works, textiles, swatches and pattern books; together they unpack a textility through processes of transfer and reproduction—using weaving as well as film, photography, archival material and display strategies as analytical tools. A second spatial narrative conceptually connects the Museum space with its immediate surrounding, a public park, as well as the Metropolitan Museum’s digital research archive; in 1995 Antonio Ratti financed the creation of the Metropolitan’s Textile Center and Reference Library which to date still carries his name.

The title of the exhibition, Textilities … and Roses Too, refers to the Lawrence textile workers strike (Massachusetts, 1912); it was above all Italian women working in the US textile industry alongside with other European, Canadian, Syrian and Turkish immigrants, who shaped the transnational politicization of workers’ culture.(2)

The exhibition—curated by Rike Frank in dialogue with Florian Pumhösl and Gregorio Magnani—will start with an opening scene including archival material, works by Gerry Bibby, Yasui Nakaji, Vincent Vulsma among others, and textiles, swatches and pattern books from the Antonio Ratti’s collections.

(1) See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFh1DdXToyE
(2) See: Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution. Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945, 2012