About

Lisa Mara Batacchi is an Italian/American multi-disciplinary artist born in Florence (IT) where she is based. 

Her poetics bring to light emotional bonds between individuals and society, documenting both a personal and a collective identity in relation to a holistic and ecological mindframe. She calls this way our attention to the urgency of the times we live in, amidst environmental, political, social and health crises, to reflect on the precariousness of our ecosystem of which we are part. By capturing the most subtle coincidences from the subject addressed in dreams, symbologies, numerology and philosophical references, she creates new time space patterns by using natural elements and dyes as an alchemic slow and layered manual process.  

Since 2013 Lisa Mara Batacchi has focused on the recovery of ancestral textile techniques that are slowly but dramatically disappearing in the globalized culture of the 21st century, both between oriental and western culture, opening complex and extremely sensitive issues, which widely extend the boundaries of art: the mutual interference or impermeability between different cultures, the status of some ethnic minorities, the roles of industrial and manual production, the theories on degrowth, the power or misery of memory, rationalism and divination, which lead to reaffirm the theorem of art as a device of social conscience.

Her textile works rather became the trail of a passage, the testimony of a meeting, the residual matter produced by a ritual action, individual or collective. Therefore, not only an artistic object, but the tangible demonstration of a complex series of interactions among people, cultures, spaces and territories.

As a result, her practice unfolds in two-dimensional works as well as in environmental and immersive site specific installations.

Lisa Mara Batacchi 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. 

She gain international attention in 2015 thanks to the Italian MIBAC Movin Up Prize that awarded her a residency and solo show curated by Sumesh Sharma at Clark House Initiative in Bombay (IND) where she established relations of cooperation with ethnic minorities as the Banjara tribe. 

Pursuing this direction she collaborated in 2016 with the Hmong tribe in Guizhou Province (CH) for The Time of Discretion. Curtain (2016) that was later installed on the south east border of the Gobi Desert for the 4th LAM – Land Art Mongolia Biennale curated by Valentina Gioia Levy. 

This project led her to continue her research through new installations and tapestries for a solo exhibition in 2018 curated by Veronica Caciolli at MAD Murate Art District in Florence (IT). The Time of Discretion project was included in Global Identities. Postcolonial and Cross-Cultural Narratives published by Mousse Publishing in 2019, was later released also as a monographic book by Silvana editoriale in 2020 and as a short film in 2021 awarded and screened in international film festivals. 

During the pandemic Batacchi learnt more deeply the art of tapestry in her hometown together 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. 

This ongoing project has been later displayed in a solo show curated by Lottozero at  the Merkatil museum for BAW – Bolzano Art Weeks as well as in the 10th International Biennale of Contemporary Textile Art The Soft Revolution curated by Barbara Pavan at the Textile Museum in Busto Arsizio. 

A second step of the project Shamal. Sand Stone Stars, a site-specific installation curated by Federica Forti, was conceived for the Dubai Design Week 2022-Design With Impact directed by Kate Barry and was reviewed as a must see installation at the Dubai Design Week on VogueArabia, ArabNews, Mille World and Elle Decor. 

Her jacquard manual tapestries from the series Crossing Destinies have been included in Designeast, a platform created by director Rue Kothari, that launched with a group exhibition at Alserkal Avenue during the Dubai Art Week 2023, concentrating on textile narratives in the Global South.

She recently attended in Istanbul the 10th Europe Asia Mediations Biennale Polska – I Am Another You You Are Another Me directed by Tomasz Wendland and is next to open in June 2024 a solo show at Kusthalle Lottozero, a Center for textile design, art and culture in Prato, Italy.

Her art works have been displayed in other solo and collective exhibitions, among others: 2nd Something Else-Off Biennale in Cairo directed by Simon Njami; Manifesta 12 collateral event in Palermo curated by Arts & Globalization; Art & Globalization Pavillion during the 57th Venice Biennale; Italian Embassy in Ulam Bator; TAC Textile Arts Center in New York; Villa Pacchiani in Pisa.