– Barbara Asei Dantoni, Paroles du tissu-monde – Maison Gacha

– Barbara Asei Dantoni, Paroles du tissu-monde –

June 20 – September 28, 2025

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Words of the world-fabric invites us to read textiles as graphic alphabets. In the wake of thinkers such as Édouard Glissant and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it explores the power of non-verbal languages — those of making, weaving, embroidering, dreaming — as forms of resistance against the erasure of individual and collective memory, through the exercise of imagination and creation.

Barbara Asei Dantoni belongs to this tradition of sensibility. Through a practice that combines glass beads, threads, and pigments, she weaves forms that enter into dialogue with the Kuba textiles of the Democratic Republic of Congo — particularly the ntshak — where interlacing, repetition, and ruptures in pattern compose a living form of thought, like a dance passed from hand to hand.

Asei Dantoni does not imitate : she reactivates. By blending ancestral knowledge and contemporary languages, she affirms the value of non-academic, non-hegemonic forms of knowledge — ways of knowing through making, listening, and care. In her work, the artisanal gesture becomes both a political act and a poetic one — a way of inhabiting the world, and of inscribing within it a voice from elsewhere.

This anchoring in the ancestral is also rooted in time: it reflects the enduring vitality of twentieth-century African textile art, in constant dialogue with contemporary creation – an approach that is central to the Maison Gacha.

Danilo Lovisi

Curator