For this 2022 edition, on the occasion of their respective 10th anniversary, the CONTEXTILE Biennial in Guimarães, Portugal, and the FITE International Festival of Extraordinary Textiles in Clermont Ferrand, France, create a joint event.
“It’s a chance to exhibit in Portugal where the most cork oaks in the world grow. The cork forests pass through the south of France, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, southern Spain and Portugal. They draw an oval, connecting the Mediterranean basin and the Atlantic Ocean, reminding us that borders are human and that nature extends according to its own functioning.
It makes sense for me to participate in this textile edition that brings together two of the countries where these trees live.
“Cork is a fantastic material for creation: as insulation, vegetable leather, composite for high-tech applications… It is both beautiful, protean, has an exemplary life cycle and durability.” Cork in architecture, design, fashion and art. G. Bounoure and C. Genevaux.
For me this material embodies a bridge between habitat and clothing. Anni Albers says that architecture and weaving have a lot to
if they go back to their common roots.
This piece, which evokes a hybridization between human and tree trunks, explores different ways of assembling cork. Favoring an exploration of structure, it is to counter the textile hyper productivity, where innovation rhymes mostly with chemistry and speed. It is a way to return to what makes the textile: its structure, and how it is implemented.
– Column – is a shaping of the Sylva weaving , the Rabanne fabric, and the Pangolin Indigo fabric, presented for the exhibition on a support made in collaboration with Lionel Accorsi of the workshop of Rias. It is a prototype of cape, for the sound loom of Musica Textilis. In this device, the rhythm, the sound, the musicality of the implementation that the loom gives to hear, is linked with the woven trace that it gives to see. To dive through the rhythm, the vibration and the sound, it is to put in light what is at the same time hidden and inherent to the matter, it is
to immerse oneself a little more in the textile.”
Lucile DROUET
