In Mapping Gaps. Beirut (Dubai, 2016-2017) she addresses these concerns through embroidered maps. Maps, by their nature, are an approximation. They are precise but questionable, never of the present moment, always undone by the act of placing one’s feet on the ground. Maps confound the distinction between memory and territory, marking a space between the familiar and the foreign which affirms and disrupts one’s sense of belonging. Maps of one’s homeland, in particular, offer a material anchor to a collective memory, a lost but immediate connection between physical ground and distant horizon. This evokes feelings common to the experience of exile, emigration, and expatriation: existing in a present that is constantly punctuated by thoughts of past and future.

Embroidery, in turn, becomes a form of mapping which retraces, restitches and recomposes one’s relation to place. Slow, meditative, meticulous and deliberate, it allows one’s feelings towards a given territory to enter into the creative process. This temporal elasticity allows personal memories to seep into the seemingly unbiased mode of map-making. Consequently, the physical space itself changes: maps become emotionally charged, intimate geographies. Like steps on the ground, each new stitch transforms a memory space (of streets, paths, etc.) into physical, material form – expanded signs and structures which alter the viewer’s own relation to time and space.

I only made two maps from this Mapping Gaps series, one of my hometown Torino and the second of Beirut, which I have a strong relationship with. These are works based on the notion of memory, but the imperfection of memory, the one that is fading. It is about that moment when you have been away from a place or a person, and you start realizing that things are not so clear anymore, that details are slipping through the holes of your memory. These maps are very personal. I have cropped elements and neighborhoods which I have relations with and I introduced mistakes in the translation from the drawings into the canvas. I navigated around those mistakes. The overall composition is asymmetrical, imbalanced, and precarious, and that also reflects the incompleteness that characterises memory. I also chose colors which identify the cities. The Torino map is made with a very prominent brick color because the city is built with this material, and Beirut was made with these very soft yellow stones. But it is not the color of Beirut anymore: when I arrived there, soon after the civil war, the city was destroyed, and it was starting to be rebuilt, this time in cement. My intentional choice of the colour is then adding another layer: the work is not only about one’s own experienced memory; rather it is a stratified mnemonic approximation, where transmitted memories are also incorporated. Like when we believe we remember episodes of our early childhood, just because we have heard them multiple times, and they become part of our mental sense of belonging.

I learned these textile techniques when I was a child but I did not particularly enjoy them at the time. When I was working on the map of Torino, I was trying to think of a medium associated with my childhood and the idea of going back to embroidery was quite natural. And from one work I moved to the next one and I kept working with textiles, and even used them as a basis for many of my video works. I also combine the textile-based practice and the performative experience. There is a series of work titled Doing & Undoing where I am stitching and then removing the stitches of specific words, such as borders, identity, memory, nationhood, concepts which are heavily invested and unstable and require a negotiation and renegotiation over time. They are performances but they are all conceived for the screen, to be experienced through video.

Most of my works are very intimate. Hand-made textile work is a long process where you spend endless hours sitting by yourself but each step of the process becomes relevant to anticipate and resolve both conceptual and technical issues. This is why it is important for me that I go through the entirety of this process. There is also an element of contradiction between the intimacy and the calmness of the work and the subjects that I choose to explore through textiles, which are mostly related to the sphere of social and political investigation. But, of course, there is a nourished tradition of studies on the agency delicately implied and claimed through feminine techniques, such as embroidery and textiles.”

Interview with Cristiana de Marchi, 10 November 2021, Abu Dhabi