TRANSMEARE

Transmeare is a word-image. It means “to slide beyond”. It creates the word “weave” and “transmit”. Perhaps it holds some echoes of distant navigations, of ancient languages, of transoceanic networks of exchange and collaboration. The works in this exhibition speak the silent language of abstraction and the mysterious language of codes to be decrypted. They conceal, in their colored folds, ways of living together, of organizing, working and thinking together. Transmeare carries a hypothesis: what if each of these discrete fictions contained, once put together, traces of thousand-year-old intrigues to be reconstituted? What if thought and art had been built, without knowing it, on the persistence of this textile weave, underground and secret? This exhibition was conceived as a community of research, friendships and artistic complicities, voluntary or involuntary, surrounding the annual project of Ulla Von Brandenburg in partnership with the city of Amiens.

Transmeare is a weft exhibition. Weft belongs to the vocabulary of textiles (the result of the interweaving of individual threads on a loom) and to that of intrigue, conspiracy, theater, criminology, and cinema. Weaving, knotting and knitting have long been the mythological preserve of women’s work. Wasn’t Clytemnestra’s anger at Agamemnon expressed in the weaving of a purple carpet, a murderous trap garment, both an object of cunning (metis) and of discord (eris)? And Medea, the dishonored witch, did she not accomplish her revenge by offering Creüse, her rival, a poisoned dress? When they are handcrafted, weaving, sewing, embroidery are laborious and silent activities and therefore mysterious and dangerous. As Colette formulated it, in La Couseuse, observing Bel Gazou “mute when she sews”, her mother was concerned about her mutism and wrote “so the word that scares me: she thinks”. Textile works are equivocal objects. They can exist in the foreground or in the background, attract the eye or disappear, demonstrate camouflage, be folded, hidden, worn, hung, integrated into architecture or retain their aesthetic autonomy. Because of their weak position in the scale of arts, they could remain in the blind spot of the colonial eye, pass under the radar of the hegemonic powers, make survive traditions elsewhere repressed and infiltrate, discreetly, all the dimensions of our societies. Textile art is an art of intrigue, and of intervention as much as of exhibition. It penetrates the domestic interiors, is exposed on the bodies, integrates museums, galleries or halls of public or private buildings, and exhibits itself in the streets. The works presented here confront individual and collective bodies, small and great history, body, theater, poetry and orality, anchor themselves, with discretion, in social and political histories that they disturb clandestinely.

The historical works of Carla Accardi, Etel Adnan, Guy de Cointet, Agnes Martin and Hessie are in active dialogue with the contemporary proposals of Caroline Achaintre, Pia Camil, Mathilde Denize, Adélaïde Feriot, Olivia Funes Lastra, Seulgi Lee and Nefeli Papadimouli, who take up their gestures in order to continue them. The exhibition continues with a series of films by Virginie Barré, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Pia Camil, Ivan Cardoso, Olivia Funes Lastra, Jean Jacquemond (Sonia Delaunay), Hanna Schwarz, Sabine Tarry, and Jessica Warboys.

Ida Soulard