Muna Mussie - Persona
Muna Mussie
Persona
Friday 13, Saturday 14, Sunday 15 May 2022
11 AM to 8 PM
commissioned, developed and curated by Xing
produced by Arte Fiera
Hall 15 - Stand F4
Persona, Muna Mussie’s activity for Oplà. Performing activities 2022, is an ad personam encounter mediated by the practice of sewing in which language is a political-affective space. After extensive work with the digital sewing machine based on the transcription of words and signs in the form of embroidery to be worn, the artist will now challenge visitors of the fair to have their worst defect embroidered on a piece of their clothing. Displaying one’s worst can be a way to relieve tension and play with conventions on social occasions focused on value. Ingmar Bergman was a masterful observer of the unconscious, with an aseptic, cold, hallucinated eye. What does the mirror reflect? For the occasion, the artist embroidered the script of the film Persona in a fabric book that can be read in the dressing room.
Mussie’s research obstinately attempts to escape the literalness of meaning. Her initial works were based on sewing as an artistic tool. In 2007, she developed FFMM with Flavio Favelli: a collection of clothing embroidered with dates, places, telephone numbers, plaques related to public or private history, continued with the creation of small paintings or objects along the same line. Ten years later, for Atlas of Transitions Biennale - Right to the City, she created a dialogue between her research and more traditional knowledge of embroidery linked to different cultures, resulting in the collective creation of a sewed book of cloth. Punteggiatura (Punctuation) is a “social fabric” made with a group of women in Bologna coming from various geographic areas, including Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and South America. The performance Curva highlighted the “automatic soul” of the sewing machine - her creative tool – with a study on hypnotic rhythm. For her solo show Bologna St. 173 | የቦሎኛ ጎዳና | شارع بولونيا , she embroidered on several nezela, traditional Eritrean fabrics, the acronyms of groups and political movements formed during the Eritrean diaspora in the ‘70s and ‘90s. Lastly, for Memory Matters, the recent project with the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation for the Democracy Biennial in collaboration with Black History Month Florence, she created the performative installation Oblio, in which a group of migrant women sew and unsew the word “oblio” (oblivion) on the façade of a scaffold, thereby becoming a temporary and active anti-monument, in response to historical monuments that are increasingly more uncomfortable and impossible to “wear.”
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