Isabella Ducrot

For Isabella Ducrot (Naples, 1931), fabric is a palimpsest in which the millenary history of humanity is deposited with its countless personal stories, the material trace of knowledge and immaterial values, a medium in which uniqueness is renounced to let collective intelligence and sensitivity prevail. During her long-term research, the artist has acquired a familiarity with textile materials that has led her to identify in them something impalpable but radical in its own way: “almost nothing, difficult to describe for lack of adjectives, no colors, no decorations, no embroidery, only the affirmation of one's essence, simplicity reduced to the minimum terms and yet grandiose and moving, like a patriotic hymn”. In her solo exhibition set up at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome from 1 August 2024 to 16 February 2025, Anna Mattirolo and Andrea Viliani – also authors of this book, published on the occasion of the exhibition – have proposed with the curators of the museum an itinerary that is articulated between the artist's works and the museum's historical textile collections, intending them both as the celebration of a textile language that is at once abstract and concrete, intimate and shared, historical and contemporary .