Networks: Textile Arts and Textility in a Transcultural Perspective (4th to 17th Centuries)

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NETWORKS is pari of a joint research project with the University of Zürich. Its aim is to study the migration of textiles, including raw materials, techniques and patterns, äs well äs their representation in other media, from China to the Mediterranean, from Late Antiquity to the early Modern period. NETWORKS will analyze the transcultural shift in meaning or function of textiles, in a series of case studies. The project wants to reconstruct the role of textiles äs agents of cultural interaction: a medium of easy transportability and high estimation in most of Asian and Mediterranean societies, textiles were a privileged field for the elaboration of cross-cultural artistic languages. In strong collaboration with Zürich, NETWORKS wants to give textiles the role in art history they deserve, especially in a moment when the field opens to a global horizon. The project will suggest an intense dialogue among Byzantine, Islamic, East Asian, and Western art histories. It will study the aesthetics of textiles regarding their materiality, their Ornaments and figurations, including notions of framing, fragmentation and seriality, äs well äs their performativity or motility. It will concentrate on the intertwining of aesthetics with Systems of knowledge and religious, political or domestic functions of textiles, wrapping bodies and articulating spaces. Under the notion of "textility", NETWORKS will finally explore textile media äs a model for texts or a metaphor of "matter or "world", and of "texture", relating to multiple ways of, interlacing and lay-out, forexample in urbanism.