UNA COPERTA TROPPO CORTA (“a far too short blanket”)

UNA COPERTA TROPPO CORTA (“a far too short blanket”)

Textile artist Tiziana Contu’s work exhibitionPalazzo Siotto – CAGLIARI, Italy

Holocaust Memorial Day, 2023

“Destroying man is almost as difficult as creating him; it wasn't easy, it wasn't short, but they succeeded” – Primo Levi, “If this is a man”

The humiliation, the offense, the degradation of man, even before the extermination, are the motivations that led the artist to conceive this "too short blanket" to be able to cover the horror of the annihilation of children, women and men, and to weave it by intertwining thin strips of paper, cut out of the Torah Jewish book, ensuring that, between warp and weft, intrusions of fragments of identity photos of the deportees are added, to recompose their faces. With the same technique, the fragments of these faces then gradually disintegrate towards the edges of the work, symbolizing the systematic and inexorable destruction of a people.

The exhibition setup emphasizes the artist's inspiring conceptual theme by simply placing the work on a "Frisian horse", a highly evocative symbol of the abomination of the concentration camps, which the blanket however cannot hide, and exposing the installation in a squalid cell illuminated by a sinister light.