Following a rewarding career in fashion, since 2007, Florence-based artist Lisa Batacchi has been exploring the emotional bonds between the individual and the society by visualising singular and collective memory through a diverse creative universe, that ranges from film and photography, to live performances, installations and public art interventions.
Focussing on ancestral textile techniques that are fast becoming extinct, she is building creative bridges between artisanal communities around the world: from knitwear artisans in her hometown to ethnic minorities in India and China. Batacchi has patched together a unique vocabulary that combines varied manual skills including crochet, weaving, needlework and batik to imagine a compelling tapestry of our shared ritualistic experiences.
ABOUT THE WORKS
Crossing Destinies, 2018
A series of 5 tapestries
Cotton thread, natural Miao indigo dye from Guizhou Province, China
61 x 62cm
Manually woven by the artist on the Takemura loom during a residency at Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio in Florence Italy. Crossing Destinies represents the manifestation of the mediumistic power of the Miao indigo: after the indigo solution sits untouched, a brilliant blue froth builds on the surface. Miao women believe that this is a sign that their ancestors are protecting them. Ancestors’s worship rituals are an important part of the dying process. Therefore, in their tincture tanks the Miao women recognize sacred signs that can reunite them once they die with their ancestors and their land of origin, the North Star. Resisting the industrial production by now spread nearly everywhere, their natural indigo dye claims their traditions and identity as well as their destiny.
The result is a series of 5 tapestries interwoven with the Miao yarns, still carried out manually by the artist and in a female context. They recall celestial universes, as reflected by an earthly microcosm.
TIME OF DISCRETION, FILM;
The Time of Discretion is an intimate, slow and relational time. It is also an artistic project, at its first chapter. Beside Italy, it has been developed in the remote areas on the south-east border of the Gobi Desert and in the Guizhou Province (South China), in search of rituals, ancient textile practices or together in one.
This long term project generated several art works, installations as also a film and a book.
For DesignEast Lisa Mara Batacchi presents parts of it: The Time of Discretion. Film (2021) and Crossing Destinies (2018).
The Time of Discretion (film), 2021
Short film, HD, color, sound, 28 min
A short movie that documents how the project came to life starting with an invitation to partecipate to the LAM 360° Land Art Mongolia biennal’s fourth edition which title was Catching the Axis Between Sky and Earth.
The artist interpreted the theme as a real invitation to explore the invisible tie which connects the sky with the earth and began thinking about realizing a large indigo-blue colored curtain. To create the art work she decided to head towards southern China where the cultivation of indigo and the natural blue sacred color is still produced. The journey which fallowed led her to stay in a Miao ethnicity village. Here she learnt the natural teqhnique of indigo tinture and with the help of the community of local women she produced Curtain (2016) a batik fabric decorated with the image of an animal, half cow and half horse. The choice of this pattern was not by chance and the hybrid figure derives from her interpretation of two I Ching hexagrams.
The artist with her Curtain will then leave China to reach the LAM 360°’s artists and organizers, finally arriving at the foot of the Altan Oovo mountain. Here the blue Curtain is more than just a work of art, it becomes a ritual object of a performance: it appears to our eyes like a tangible trace of the initiation journey taken up by the artist, a silent testimony of the passage to distant places, in a narration outside and beyond time, space and history, where reality and imagination blend in a message of hope.
For more information, images and purchase enquiry, please email skene@ruekothari.com
Website: lisabatacchi.com
Instagram: @lisabatacchi