Alessio Mazzaro, 2019-20, series of tapestries, different leathers (special waste from the Italian fashion industry)
We need time to free ourself from the shape that has been taught to us, time and epiphanies to understand and find the courage to really be ourself, to find back our true self, outside the narration that education has passed down to us.
Sao Paulo is a city that makes theory meaningless. One day, we were walking close to a flyover and we heard sounds coming from the bottom. We went to check and found the rehearsal of a carnival band. That encounter changed me. I saw a group of people honouring the ancestors, performing memory with such an energy, that all the researches I knew in Europe, about performing archives, lost sense.
The series of tapestries is the consequence of my residency in Sao Paulo at FAAP in 2019: a practice of composition as a way to free myself from theoretical western structures and concerns, starting again from the self. Geographies for paths to follow, maps not perceived, reconnected territories. All the cuttings are recovered “special waste material” from the Italian fashion industry. They are sewn together with my mother that before the 2012 crisis used to be a “mistra”, a person that sew shoes or bags in the luxury factories in Italy. In the spirit of Edouard Glissant writings, these are lands without territory.
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