Displacing Autobiography and Intermediality: Elisa Biagini and Sabrina Mezzaqui

Abstract

By looking at intermedial works of the poet Elisa Biagini and the artist Sabrina Mezzaqui as well as their most recent collaboration for the Galleria Continua's exhibition c’è qui nell'aria la parolaramo, this article investigates the relationship between poetic texts and textiles. The “intra-action,” to use feminist physicist Karen Barad's term, between the language of poetry and that of textile emerges through a paradigm of entanglements that expands the semantic capacity of both words and textiles. The verses displayed by Biagini in Mezzaqui's installations belong to Da una crepa (2014), which weaves imaginary dialogues with Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan. Da una crepa will be central to this paper's investigation together with Le ossa non sono poi così solide exhibited at Museo della Specola in 2010 and poems from Biagini's most recent work, significantly entitled Filamenti (2020). In this collection, the thread emerges as a key tool not only to recompose a body that is represented as fragmented and disjointed, but also as a “filo memoria” that can reconstitute an identity understood in highly corporeal terms (especially in the section “Moto perpetuo (un'autobiografia)”. A reflection on identity and autobiography is also central to Mezzaqui's practice, especially in Appunti per autobiografia del rosso (2017–2018), where through 33 woven and decorated books, she attempts to weave an autobiography. In both Biagini's and Mezzaqui's intermedial textile poems, the viewer/reader engages with a thread endowed with a strong vitalistic, almost biological power able to weave together identity, biography, and memory.