Mother Tongue, weaving the intangible

Losing a native language can mean not only the loss of cultural heritage, but also the loss of the ability to communicate and share specific and unique knowledge. Additionally, Indigenous languages ​​often have symbolic and spiritual value for the communities that speak them, and their loss can have a negative impact on people's mental health and quality of life.

What does it mean for each of us to understand or speak the native language? How, through verbal, oral and written language, through linguistic codes and signs are we able to address the theme of extinction which is increasingly present on this earth over time? It is for this reason that the Italian artist Mara Di Giammatteo, who has always addressed the concept of memory in her works and artistic research, has recently focused on the links between the mother tongue and issues linked to climate change. There is a very strong link, according to her, between spoken and written memory and what seems to be becoming more and more urgent and real, namely the problem of the risk of extinction of living beings on this planet. In his works we can find fragments of writing from an ancient dialect of a high mountain village in central Italy, his place of origin, which disappears with the last elderly people living there. In the same way, the artist embroiders on old hand-woven hemp canvases the names of species of insects or other animals that are disappearing from the earth. Writing the sound of an ancient language and writing the names of an endangered animal species are for the artist a pretext to investigate the link between disasters linked to globalization and climate change.

Writing is a way for Mara Di Giammatteo to remember, to fix forever, through the art and tradition of weaving, in a slow rhythm that places the artist in a dimension of silence, what is there and which soon may no longer be there.