Velvet Armour at Made In ed.3, Artissima Fair, Turin, Italy

Curated by Sonia Belfiore

29 October 2025 to 2 November 2025

The award enabled me to undertake a residency with Manifattura Tessile DINOLE, where I developed a body of work through a close engagement with the company’s textile production. Throughout the residency, I focused on the creative reuse of industrial remnants, working with both archival materials and manufacturing waste. The velvet powder residue generated during production became the basis for a sculptural project, which I shaped through a range of finishing techniques. As part of this process, I produced casts from the historic wooden printing blocks held in the company’s archive, originally used for stamping textile patterns. These casts were transformed into moulds in fabric pulp and incorporated into the final works.

This project extended my ongoing research into armour as a conceptual and material framework for examining the body and its thresholds. Developed in dialogue with the manufacturer, the resulting sculptures integrate industrial residues—such as velvet powder, fabric pulp, and textile fragments—into rib-like and cavity- like forms that evoke anatomical structures, armour plates, and skeletal frameworks. Their hybrid bodies, hovering between anthropomorphic armour and animal-like exoskeletons, foreground the tension between defence and vulnerability, with the apparent solidity of their forms offset by the delicacy of their surfaces and the softness of the reconstituted velvet. In this context, armour—historically associated with protection, strength, and resilience—assumed renewed relevance. The works’ porous, fragmented bodies reflect contemporary concerns shaped by environmental crisis, social instability, and collective precarity, suggesting that protection now extends beyond the physical body to the safeguarding of ecological systems and social structures. By transforming industrial residues into hovering, quasi-anatomical guardians, the project reframed armour as a permeable threshold where resilience and vulnerability remain inseparable.

In Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004), the author argues that bodies are defined by their intrinsic exposure and interdependence—ideas that closely aligned with my exploration of armour as both protection and revelation. My works questioned the meaning of protection: whether it serves as a defence against external threats or as a structure capable of supporting and transforming what is inherently fragile. The use of velvet—a material associated with softness and luxury—within protective sculptural forms heightened the tension between strength and delicacy, care and resistance.

Made In ed.3

Artissima Fair

Lingotto Fiere Turin

10126

Turin, Italy

29 October 2025 to 2 November 2025