Textiles possess a specific quality: they are a flexible material that can be layered and is capable of retaining traces. Folds, seams, overlaps, and signs of use become visual elements that bear witness to the passage of time and to production processes. From this perspective, waste is not considered a marginal material, but rather a material archive of memory and possibility, capable of receiving new images and new processes of visual construction.
In the context of The Matter Loop, the research is developed in collaboration with Braida SRL, a company specialized in the production of seating. The dialogue with the company introduces into the project a reflection on the relationships between body, object, and domestic space, elements that are also central to the construction of the work’s visual imaginary.
Braida Srl SB, a long-established company in the Manzano chair district and now a Benefit Corporation, represents a significant configuration of the current local production system. Its organisational model is based on a territorial network of suppliers, artisans and specialized firms: while design and marketing remain the responsibility of the company, the production of components is distributed across a widespread and coordinated supply chain. This structure reflects the transformation of the furniture and chair district, from a localized and integrated production system to a network of interdependent competences.
The textile scraps and components made available for the project bear the imprint of this organizational structure: fragments of a distributed production chain, marked by multiple processes and transitions. Once incorporated into the artistic process, they become not only material supports but also narrative surfaces, in which textile matter takes shape as a site of sedimentation and memory, capable of conveying the operational stratifications that have passed through it.
Giulia Maria Belli’s work stems from a continuous collection of images, photographs and small objects found and gathered over time. These materials form a working archive that informs her drawings, paintings and installations. The image is not treated as a finished representation, but as a trace or visual residue that re-emerges and is reconstituted through the artistic process.
Alongside oil painting and the use of textiles, a recurring technique in the artist’s practice is the monotype. The line, often unstable and jagged, produces evanescent and ambiguous images, akin to memories that emerge and fade away. This quality of partial appearance runs through the entire body of work, where images surface and recede like suspended presences.
In the context of The Matter Loop, this approach takes shape in a large-scale composite textile work constructed through the juxtaposition and layering of images and surfaces. The fabric, arranged like a visual patchwork, alternates between abstract fields, textural traces and figurative fragments that evoke a domestic space.
Two black silhouettes, one standing and one seated, emerge as suspended figures lacking any clear identity, set within a scene that seems to belong more to memory than to reality.
The reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s short story *Blue Dog’s Eyes* serves as the atmospheric framework for the work. The gaze, the distance and the impossibility of contact become spatial and compositional tensions rather than an illustrated narrative.
In this process the textile material acts as a site of accumulation and transformation, capable of retaining traces and rendering them as images in a state of constant flux.
Collective exhibition
Matter, process and collaboration between art and industry
28 March – 26 April
The Circle
