Thread of Abstraction: A Comparative Study of Italian and International Textile Artists

Rather than treating textiles as defined by their material qualities alone, the lecture opens a broader understanding of the textile as a complex form of thinking that emerged with the earliest expressions of the human. From this perspective, the recent inclusion of textile in contemporary art discourse is less a novelty than a return: a renewed recognition of one of humanity’s oldest practices, reactivated under contemporary conditions.

The lecture travels through pivotal moments when textiles and art become most deeply intertwined. Rather than following a linear history, it compares textile practices across diverse socio-cultural contexts from the earliest mythological stories to the present. Despite sharp differences and contemporary adaptations within today’s infrastructures—fashion, computation, and digital systems—what endures across cultures, time, and geography are textiles’ fundamental principles: time, touch, and repetition. In a world increasingly driven by speed and screens, these practices insist on slowness and embodiment—rewinding us, thread by thread, back into our humanity.