Client: Gallery Libby Sellers, Audax Textiel Museum Tilburg

Year: 2009


Commissioned by Gallery Libby Sellers and Audax Textielmuseum, Tilburg, ‘Colony’ is a series of mohair wool blankets that celebrates the narrative potential of textiles.

‘Colony’ takes as conceptual starting point such geo-political (and highly topical) issues as migration, assimilation and the historical cross-flow of cultural currents between North Africa and Italy, further investigating the concepts presented in Formafantasma’s earlier ceramic series ‘Moulding Tradition’.

Each of the blankets, akin to oversized postcards, refers to one of the three major colonies that Italy held in North Africa (Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia) until 19th century. The blankets are labelled with reproductions of contemporaneous stamps from Benadir (Somalia) while the woven imagery traces Italian cultural influences on local North African urban planning and architecture. Contemporary data, historical cartographies of migration flows and textual references to the

recent concordat between Italy and Libya to stop illegal immigration from Africa to Europe are woven together to create theoretical and visual links between past and contemporary events.

The project conceptualises the complexity of national identity and illustrates how the sense of ‘local’ can be found far from that locality’s national borders.

With ‘Colony’ Studio Formafantasma aim to examine notions of cultural heritage and industrial versus craft techniques, but more importantly to use design as a compass to chart the different meanings of tradition in a globalised context.


Photo Credit: Luisa Zanzani


COLONY

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Giuseppe Petazzi, Fiat Tagliero, 1938, Asmara

Casa Littoria, Italian Colonies, around 1930