URBAN WEAVING

You are cordially invited to visit the exhibition

URBAN WEAVING / URBANO TKANJE

at the exhibition room Mala galerija Banke Slovenije, Ljubljana, Slovenija.
The exhibition is on view from 9th July to 22nd August 2020.

The project was created at the subject Textile design 1b.
Concept authors: Maja ZupancMartin KalužaGašpar Marinič
Participating students: Pia WallnerMarija OkršlarLenart ŠolarJudita KociperZoja Muhič

Mentors: Prof. Marija Jenko, Assist. Prof. Katja Burger Kovič, Assist. Arijana Gadžijev
Curator MGBS: Vladimir Vidmar
Tecnical assistant: Marjeta Čuk, BA Organizational informatics

In the current situation, it is impossible not to start from the context of the times in which the Urban Weaving project came about. The design process that gave birth to the project coincides with the Covid-19 pandemic, the closure of education institutions, a ban of physical contact, and the outlawing of human touch. The aim of the project is closely tied to society: making textiles and their many roles relevant to today’s society. It led first-year students of textile and clothing design to hold a series of urban installations in the summer semester of their textile design course, and to transform the gallery space through communal building. Touch is absolutely vital to creating textiles. Weaving by hand, the exhausting but exhilarating repetition of one and the same movement of hand and thread, was shifted into the virtual world, into computer simulations, and experimenting with small looms and models. Although an authentic experience of the urban and gallery space was impossible, each student laboured week by week, despite the psychological stress in their bodies, in the intimate environment of hearth and home, to produce something special.
The Urban Weaving installation is driven by feelings born in the city, but taken up by our students and tailored to the architecture of the gallery space. Fabrics at various stages occupy the heart of the gallery. The soft array feels like it is floating above the ground. It appears gradually, sometimes showing us the flow of warp alone, which here and there is thickened and interwoven with weft into a connected surface that ripples across the space. With a growing sense of and desire for freer, more daring, and more expansive artistic expression of their concepts, they first practised in the virtual occupation of the Little Gallery space. Their intuitive weavings, which were driven by keen exploration of the meaning and communicativeness of spatial textiles, slowly entangled and spread across the ground and into the corners, reached for the ceiling, embraced the light shafts and gently fell towards the floor, to the earth. Woven organisms were born in the form of sly trees, whose soft whiteness and transparent forms have subtly taken possession of the gallery space, inviting the observer into what seems to be a forest.
The Urban Weaving project has thus created a gallery microflora, which in its free but controlled organic propagation represents an allegory at multiple levels. At the first level we can interpret it as an allegory for the city, the urban jungle, which is ever torn between efficient organisation on one side, and life on the other, whose creativity sketches out its own principles. At the second level lies deliberation of the essence of creativity as the interplay of sources, fragments and citations: the intertextuality that combines diverse inputs irrespective of the existing hierarchy. The collective work of the Urban Weaving exhibition is more than anything else a reminder in these times that public space is something we create and endow with meaning ourselves, and needs to be relentlessly defended again and again from authoritarian attempts to take possession of it.

Author of photographies: Eva Tisnikar

Links:
Mala galerija Banke Slovenije
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