Lisa Mara Batacchi
is an Italian/American artist-cum-traveller working across textile, social studies and the visual arts.
Born in Florence (IT) where she is based, she studied Fashion Design at Polimoda and then worked as a designer, more significantly for Vivienne Westwood in London. She completed her training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.
Her poetic brings to light emotional bonds between individuals and society, documenting both a personal and a collective identity in relation to local communities as well as to transnational issues. By using an anthropological approach in the analysis of a specific context, her works capture the most subtle variations deriving from dreams, symbologies, numerology, memories and history. From conceptual bases she creates devices that can lead like talismans to new forms of interactions and thoughts, in particular by exploring the delicate boundaries between earth-humankind-cosmos.
Since 2013, she has focused more deeply on the recovery of ancestral textile techniques, related to rituals and to traditions that are slowly but dramatically disappearing in the globalized culture of the 21st century, both between oriental and western culture. Pursuing this direction, she established relations of cooperation: at first with knitwear artisans in her home town, Florence (IT) for the “Soulmate (Within Time)” project; later in 2015, awarded by the Italian MIBAC Movin’up Prize, with the Banjara ethnic minority during a residency and solo show at Clark House Initiatives in Bombay (IND); in 2016 with the Miao tribe in Guizhou Province (CH) for “The Time of Discretion” project.
As a result, her works come together as site specific or environmental installations, sometimes far from civilization as with “Curtain” (2016) that took place on the south east border of the Gobi Desert for the 4th LAM – Biennial Land Art Mongolia.
Her long term project “The Time of Discretion” has been included in “Global Identities. Postcolonial and Cross-Cultural Narratives” by Mousse Publishing in 2019 as also published as a monographic book by Silvana editoriale in 2020.
During the pandemia she learnt the art of tapestry in her home town sharing knowledge with expert textile restorers. This generated her project “Sand Storms in Medio Mundi” produced by the Goethe Institut of Tbilisi (GE) and Baku (AZ) for “Silk”, a group exhibition curated by Alfons Hug, presented during the 59th Venice Biennale at GAD-Giudecca Art District.
A second step of the project “Shamal. Sand Stone Stars”, a site-specific installation promoted by Polimoda, was coinceived for the Dubai Design Week 2022 – “Design With Impact” directed by Kate Barry and has been reviewed as a must see installation on VogueArabia, ArabNews, Mille World and Elle Decor.
Her jaquard manual tapestries from the series “Crossing Destinies” (2018) have been recently included in “(Un)Common Threads”, a group show project by DesignEast, presented at Arselkal Avenue during the Dubai Art Week 2023, focusing on textile narratives in the Global South.
She recently has been invited to attended in Istanbul the 10th Europe Asia Mediations Biennale Polska – “I Am Another You You Are Another Me” directed by Tomasz Wendland.
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