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Reflections on Shattering Silk

Responses to Sandra Binion’s The Beauty of Something Ripped

May 11 – June 18, 2022 at the Alliance Française de Chicago. 

“…details that have broken through, to form a gap riddled puzzle of obscure events.”

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  Arlette Farge

The Allure of the Archive p94.

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The Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome - 

- contains a five hundred year interconnected ancestral history – 

a story that involves four families – 

a private home handed on through patrimonial succession.

 

The sequence of galleries that endure to this day 

holds some of the most remarkable European art – 

 

These rooms betray their familial aspirations too – 

As a consolidation of power in successive unions. 

The walls of each room are hung in density, 

each of the arrangements display and commemorate the majesty of its owners.

 

An unambiguous past, 

- an accumulation of artifacts 

forming a network of instances, events and experiences.

The December air in Rome sometimes carries a certain cloying wetness, 

And upon entering the Palazzo from Via del Corso 

an impression of condensation persists – 

Perhaps carried into these silk lined chambers, 

by visitors coming in from the street.

 

Breath is visible today, 

There is a sense that these walls - already thick with their hereditary burden, 

- contain corresponding layers and residues, 

Witness to centuries of exhaled breath. 

But this decorative silk, intended to bring a feeling like light and air, 

has become heavier still 

heavy with excesses of aspiration 

heavy with excesses over time, 

Excesses that have somehow manifested in shredding –

Each silk drape, 

and each silk tapestry cleaves to reveal 

its wool-batted under layer – 

It is as if the aspirant weight, 

- the weight of time itself, 

- the infusion of events witnessed and breath breathed out  – 

has rendered these fine cloths ripe – 

- ripe with a burden and fit for bursting.

 

Salinity

To enhance its characteristic shine and brilliance,

Raw silk cloth is washed in a solution of metallic salts – 

a process that will also eventually secures its demise –

Over time the metallic salts form sharp crystals that cut through the fibers - 

Quietly and gradually this heavy drapery – 

made heavier with metal salt – 

will become dust.

For this reason silk is said to have an ‘inherent vice’

In textile conservation terms, 

this disintegration is known as ‘shattering’

 

…a weft that falls into dust.

Woven silk fabric carries rich cultural and linguistic associations too – 

Exoticized and prized in Europe 

- heavy with echoes of it’s origins in ancient China 

Silk is infused with an almost alchemical sense of mystery, 

- alongside strong poetic associations 

that calls to mind human failing and human frailty -

This beauty and mystery that falls literally into shreds, 

Is enacting a kind of material hubris.

 

Picking through a series of etymological associations –

The origin of the word – Shred – 

is strongly allied with the Anglo Saxon word - Shroud- 

A -shroud- is literally a ‘garment’ – 

 

And circulating closely around this idea are such words as 

- vestment, dress, attire and raiment 

which themselves point to an array of cloth 

and ornament related conditions associated with drapery, 

decoration and embroidery.

The word shatter has its origins in an extended understanding of material conditions too -

The image of disintegrating decorative cloth -

- here becomes connected to the natural world –

 

The word ‘Shatter’, a verb,  - comes from the middle English word ‘schateren,  

and is a direct relation of the Anglo Saxon word - scateran.

Literally to scatter – To dash as a falling stream; 

And hence – to break in pieces.

as a falling stream

to dash – falling as a stream of water -

as a glassy column - suggestive of an emotional condition as much as a material outcome -

Falling, and shattering below, 

scattering into innumerable pieces - 

pieces that flash, fly and falter, 

shards of water become shards of light that disperse into the air,

turning into spray and mist – evaporative and aspirational again -

A disintegrating cloth – might then - feel a certain kinship with scattering water.

 

Perhaps it is at first taut, and then turgid, 

full and surging, Water can be powerful, supportive 

cloth like, strong and vehement -

Then water like cloth can become easy and yielding, rolling and soft. 

Caressing - A physical sensuality becomes palpable.

Aqueous and in every sense tranquil and flowing

And then in every sense mist-like and air-borne – heavenly even.

Standing in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj 

surrounded by dampened shattering silk 

The silk fibers as they scatter and flow from their drapery, 

merge heave and flow downward in thick disintegrating pools…

 

Consanguineous

These rooms reveal themselves -

to have been drawn forth on the breath 

of the people who made them.

A chain of experiences - From the silk moth to the tourist with their audio guides, 

each contributing their own part to this material story – 

Materials forming a network of archival, narrative nodes.

No single element or instance is capable of carrying the whole. 

And each elemental instance is as Arlette Farge articulates - 

- only ‘effective as a social observatory’ in its ‘scattered details’. 

“…details that have broken through, to form a gap riddled puzzle of obscure events.”    

 

The beauty of this shattering silk is its friability. 

These material transformations offer an unambiguous view 

beyond the artifice to a chain of – ‘frail [physical] memories contained within’ –

 

And the certainty that no single document can find meaning in itself.

The beauty of this shattering silk, is that it reminds us – like everything – like everyone it exists in the present – 

 

And like everything, it will eventually turn to dust.

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