Turkish Red by Formafantasma
There is something about certain colours that leaves us speechless. Deep blue, aquamarine, bright yellow, each colour has a profound ability to communicate a lot about both our culture as well as our history and surroundings. It is inevitable that we link certain colours to certain material artefacts, hence TextielMuseum in Tilburg has decided to dedicate an entire exhibition to Turkish Red, a particularly vibrant hue of red. The curator of the show, titled Turkish Red & More, Caroline Boot has invited five Netherlands-based designers to draw inspiration from the museum’s archives and develop a new project around what they have discovered: “the five projects are presented in a special context, together with the sources that they refer to: Art Nouveau weavings, objects from the Art Deco period, sample books, dye recipes, antique handiwork manuals, blankets and trimmings.”
The Italian duo based in The Netherlands, Formafantasma, has created a collection of 17 silk textiles titled BTMM1514 (Turkish Red), based on the archive of Driessen family and numerous samples of turkish red Felix Driessen has collected through the years.
Turkish red is drawn from madder roots, and was first developed in India and later brought to Turkey and Greece. Playing with the traditional modes of production, particular of Andrea Trimarchi‘s and Simone Farresin’s approach, they have created a series of silk textiles dyed with madder roots in collaboration with a German colourist, while the patterns were taken from the Driessen’s books, together with other visual element historically associated with Turkish red.
This apparently simple project clearly evokes the influence of colours, the Turkish red in particular, in our historical and present economic, geographical, cultural, aesthethical, social context. Turkish Red & More is on display until the 26th of May 2013 at TextielMuseum in Tilburg.
