OSTIA

ROME

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The central intervention of the Ostia, Rome, edition of The Non Museum Project is the production of a quilt, inspired by the Tristan quilt, a medieval storytelling Sicilian bed cover owned by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Continuing the tradition of sewing for storytelling, artists from five cities around the globe contributed with embroidery, soft sculpture, crochet, beach and boat textiles and cables, stitched together.

 

This is a memorial quilt in honour of Anna, a kind resident of Rome’s Idroscalo, where the installation took place, known to photographer Stephanie Gengotti. It is also in memory of P. P. Pasolini. As a multidisciplinary writer, Pasolini often explored socio-political issues related to life in the Roman suburbs, voicing extremely harsh criticism of the Italian petty bourgeoisie and what he saw as the Americanization, cultural degeneration, and greed-driven consumerism taking over Italian culture. Pasolini’s unsolved and extremely brutal abduction, torture, and murder at Ostia happened on the same day as the installation, fifty years ago. The remembrance of both Anna and Pasolini underscores the need to give a voice to people of the suburbs.

 

Historically in the arts, archetypically feminine manual works have represented women who have been kept in the shadows, both individually and collectively, confined to the domestic sphere, their gestures dismissed as decoration rather than recognised as creation. In society, as Pasolini observed, the average person from the lower classes is often reduced to a number. The quilt gathers what institutions overlook, and The Non Museum Project operates in the same current.  By reinterpreting this practice within a contemporary framework, the project positions it as a vital language of artistic and cultural expression. Textiles from two continents are assembled into one artwork, where threads of the artists’ own stories, as well as their contribution to collective identity, are reflected in these site-specific interventions.

 

This is a quilt for storytelling, a piece made of fragments, ornaments, and graffiti, delving into the ordinary and the mundane, inspired by anonymous lives in the suburbs of Rome. The quilt serves as a map of these stories, both as an object and as a site.