Texte, texture, textile

The performance will be the result of the residency at ODRADEK whose concept is “Text – Texture – Textile”, by Simone Schuiten and Kiran Katara.

Artists in residence Marina Gasparini (Italy) and Natalia Blanch (Belgium/Argentina) will give a performance on a topic that represents a link between their respective artistic research.

Marina will create letterings by sewing together used cloth garments whose textures primarily represent flowers. The letters will compose the sentence “What migrated was portable”.

The sentence quotes André Malraux’s “Imaginary Museum”, in which he talks about the limited capacity of a modern museum to hold objects on a “one-to-one” scale.  The text “What migrated was portable” will be carried by a group of performers in the shape of a banner, where letters are made of fabric and joined together by chains.

Meanwhile Natalia will carry a work about reparation and migration (what we bring and what we left behind when we migrate). Her artwork is made out of ripped parts of rice paper hand sewn together, it measures about 4 x 3 m. An excerpt of John Berger’s poem “Separation” is embroidered on its surface. After a walk around the garden among the performers, she will stop inside the building and start folding and unfolding the big embroidered piece of art.

The gesture of folding and unfolding the work implies the care and risk we face whenever we challenge the strain of leaving our places and roots.

Like the migration of objects, plants and animals, human movement was not always an option.

We believe that a botanical garden like Botanique is the best place where the performance could take place since it encompasses a cultural diversity as well as a variety of plants, both being representative of what “was portable”.