Antonio Marras Limited Edition

The pages of this atlas are the 11 carpets/tapestries that Antonio Marras has made exercising full creative freedom on as many traditional Afghan kilims in hand-twisted wool, and woven by Amini. Only three basic colors – black, burgundy, ecru – have been agreed. Marras worked on these kilims as if they were canvases;  instead of painting them, he placed fragments on them (he calls them “ideas”) that highly skilled embroiderers from Bitti, a village in the Barbagia region of Sardinia, then proceed to embroider by hand, stitch by stitch. The “fragments” that the designer used are (in his words) «the inner coatings of jackets, or linings: the canvases that cover and reinforce the structure of my clothes. I worked with the inside materials, with leftover pieces, with what is usually thrown away, cast aside, and that instead I have taken up and put back in place, reshaped, reformed». Thus combinations of seemingly distant elements arise in a sort of executive dichotomy. In his pursuit of correspondence between apparently diverse contexts Marras has also used precious elements, fished out from the depths of his archive, which he draws upon for unique interventions in his fashion creations. «The stories I tell are always born from a personal setting» he explains. The words of Sardinian artist Maria Lai, who inspired Marras’s technical research, come to mind: «We must stop and listen to the voice of things because these would have spoken». The designer’s carpets/tapestries indeed tell stories. One only needs to tune in. «Ultimately, as if by magic, everything has taken a new shape under a new form of balance. I believe that these rugs can tell stories just by looking at them. They lift you up and take you elsewhere. Into another dimension. Perhaps along a journey. Or into a forest, or a beach. Sitting on these rugs you can read out the stories that maybe you have deep inside, but have not yet managed to voice and, seeing them reflected around you, you will tap into them».