MADE IN MIND #20

Page 34

IN CONVERSATION WITH COQUELICOT MAFILLE Elena Solito

In Gilbert Durand’s The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary, the Imaginary, the Day and Night Worlds are fundamental in the construction of an individual reality. A reality that man needs to give a sense to the passing of time, which becomes waiting for an inevitable transience. A theoretical framework, the one analyzed, in which Coquelicot Mafille acts (Paris, 1975), of mixed nationality (Italian and French-Danish) who lives between Paris and Milan. Her works, through the technique of embroidery, declined in a contemporary key, draw a dreamy and playful universe, and an imaginary of stories and narratives, which tell through a lucid lightness and a deep awareness, a melting pot of cultures, identities, thoughts. With embroidery (with thread, painting and adhesive…), writing, together with mediums such as photographs, collages, sound and video manipulations, defines a geography of (above all) urban space that takes on a meaningful value of symbolism. The places and spaces in the city that she chooses are symbolic: places in decline, walls, bus shelters, the store windows and supports of various kinds that become a field of investigation to expose personal poetics through a refined and recognizable style.

Elena Solito: Embroidery is the characteristic of your artistic practice. Through your embroidery you tell stories and your stories originate from writing. Tell us. Coquelicot Mafille: For me, even before visual art there was writing in the form of poetry, prose in diaries and travel reports. My relationship with the world unfolded for a long time through observation and the written word. In 2010, starting to embroider was based on the same gestures and meditation as handwriting. What I used to tell with phrases turned into embroidered drawing. The choice of embroidery was natural because on the one hand I was familiar with the tools and fabrics because of my mother, a designer and dressmaker, and on the other hand it was intertwined with the temporality of writing, with that particular creative mood. With time, I declined embroidery on other supports, surfaces and with different means. In embroidery there is narrative, we are in time, in memory, in an ancient ritual. It is an instrument of mental peregrination, a palette to draw on and from which to move with thought and connect to previous worlds. The needle and thread, a precise painted line or an adhesive line lead the spirit to translate its intimate language.

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E.S. Looking at your work, I thought of Slowness by Milan Kundera. Reading is an action that involves slowness and attention, but also embroidery. In an association of ideas we find these elements in Lectures. Tell us about the project. C.M. There is a phrase in that book that says that when things happen too quickly, nobody is sure of anything anymore, not even of themselves. The feeling of the acceleration of time together with an overwhelming flow of information leads to bewilderment. It is certainly a human perception, a product of the mind. Nature’s time is another, it holds the rhythm of things that are formed and stabilised. There is the stratification of all essential moments. In this sense writing and reading inhabit the space and time at the centre of the eye of the cyclone. Dilated, suspended, not oscillating. Lectures, to be read in French, is an unpublished project of books and drawings, of readers, of a passion for reading that interacts with painting, drawing and photography. Taking up the pictorial tradition realized through the centuries, it proposes portraits of people of any origin and of all ages while reading or holding a book in their hands, together with the title of a book, the author, the publishing house and the date of the


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