Isabella Ducrot (Naples, 1931) sees fabric as a palimpsest that records the thousands of years of human history with its countless personal stories, the material traces of knowledge and immaterial values, a means by which uniqueness is renounced in order to ensure that collective intelligence and sensibility prevail. In the course of her many years of research, the artist has acquired a familiarity with textiles that has led her to identify in them something impalpable but in its own way radical. “Almost nothing, difficult to describe for lack of adjectives, no colours, no decorations, no embroidery, only the affirmation of the essence, simplicity reduced to a minimum yet grand and moving, like a patriotic anthem.” In her solo exhibition presented at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome from 1 August 2024 to 16 February 2025, Anna Mattirolo and Andrea Viliani – also the authors of this book, published on the occasion of the exhibition – with the museum’s curators presented an itinerary laid out between the artist’s works and the museum’s historical textile collections, interpreting them as the celebration of a textile language that is both abstract and concrete, intimate and shared, historical and contemporary.
