About

Lisa Mara Batacchi (Florence, 1980) is an Italian-American visual artist whose practice develops through long term projects in which textile research serves as a generative core. From this nucleus, works may expand into installations, film, drawing, or collective actions, forming interconnected constellations.

She studied Fashion Design at Polimoda and gained experience in high fashion, including work with Vivienne Westwood in London. She later pursued a degree in Visual Arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

Since 2013, her artistic practice has evolved through travels, residencies and collaborations with local communities across regions from South and Central Asia to the Middle East, where sustained engagement with textile and social traditions shapes a rigorously conceptual approach.

Devoted to hand weaving and the recovery of tapestry techniques, initially self-taught and later enriched through collaboration with master weavers and restorers, she reactivates archetypal forms, shifting them from historical belonging toward renewed universal significance.

A recurring vertical tension structures her work. Her tapestries function as woven thresholds: concentric symmetries and calibrated intersections articulate chromatic polarities and processes of internal transformation, evoking the axis mundi and inviting a corresponding shift in the viewer.

Working with natural dyes and organic elements through a slow, layered and alchemical process, she approaches weaving as material transmutation. Threads are combined through numerological and symbolic structures, generating textile surface shaped by rhythm, sublimation and interplay of light.

Much of her research unfolds along the historical routes of the Silk Road and in regions of the Middle East, contexts long defined by connection and today marked by instability. Her works open spaces of continuity and resonance, suggesting the persistence of shared symbolic languages across cultural and political divides.

Shamal Sand Stone Stars, conceived for Dubai Design Week (2022), was featured as a must-see in Vogue Arabia, Harper’s Bazar Arabia, Arab News, Mille World and El Decor.

Her multidisciplinary project The Time of Discretion developed in collaboration with Miao women in Guizhou, China, explored natural indigo dyeing and its spiritual dimensions. The project resulted in Global Identities: Postcolonial and Cross-Cultural Narratives (Mousse Publishing, (2019), a monograph by Silvana Editoriale (2020), and an award winning short film (2021).

Soulmates (Within Time) (2015), developed with the Banjara community in India, was awarded the Movin’Up Award prize and featured in Mumbai Mirror.

Her works have been exhibited internationally. Solo exhibitions, include: Sand Storms in Medio Mundi I-III, Kunsthalle Lottozero, Prato (2024); Shamal Sand Stone Stars, Dubai Design Week (2022); Sand Storms in Medio Mundi, Merkantil Museum, BAW – Bolzano Art Week (2022); The Time of Discretion, MAD – Murate Art District, Florence (2018); Soulmates (Within Time), Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (2015).

Her works have also been presented in international biennals and group exhibitions, including: 10th Europe Asia Mediations Biennale Polska, Istanbul (2023); Un(common) Threads, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai Art Week (2023); Silk, GAD-Giudecca Art District, during the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018); 2nd Something Else, Off Cairo Biennale (2018); Remembering the Future, Art & Globalization Pavillion during the 57th Venice Biennale; and the 4th LAM – Land Art Mongolia Biennale (2016).