Colony
Gallery Libby Sellers, 2011
Colony are a series of mohair wool blankets that celebrates the narrative potential of textiles.
Colony takes as a 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. It thus further investigates 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 territories that Italy held in North Africa (Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia) until midway the twentieth century.
The blankets are labeled with reproductions of contemporaneous stamps from Benadir (Somalia), while the woven imagery traces Italian cultural influences on local North African urban planning and architecture. Current data, historical cartographies of migration flows and textual references to the recent treaty 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 conceptualizes the complexity of national identity and illustrates how the sense of ‘local’ can be found far from that locality’s national borders. With Colony, Formafantasma uses design as a compass to chart the different meanings of tradition in a global context.
