Olaf Holzapfel's and Guido Yannitto's textile works.
This book explores the connections of Holzapfel's and Yannitto's textile works with the works by Wichí weavers, and asks about new forms of collaborations involving different communities and their forms of knowledge. Both are interested in the landscape, urban grids, routes and forms of knowledge, lost textile histories, the relationship between crafts and visual arts—and it is about forecasting what new models can be in the face of historical oblivion between city and country. What might the local ecologies; the forms of exchange of tomorrow look like?
Published on the occasion of Olaf Holzapfel's and Guido Yannitto's exhibition at Schwartzsche Villa, Berlin, in 2020-2021.
Olaf Holzapfel's work (born 1969 in Görlitz, lives and works in Berlin) proves the indissoluble connection between human settlement, technique, and abstraction. Elementary space-generating methods like plaiting, weaving, and latticing—age-old settler techniques—stem from natural linear entities. These techniques are exceptional in that they don't differentiate between technique or machine, or whether a structure is purely functional, for living, or auxiliary. Holzapfel scrutinizes the perception and presence of material within space and whether an image discourse can exist without these physical modules. For him the landscape, and the material it contains, is more than a symbol that fixes identity; rather, it becomes a transmitter.
Guido Yannitto (born 1981 in Argentina) graduated from painting in Córdoba, Argentina. He lived in México, Colombia, and Buenos Aires exploring popular cultures of one of his major interest. He has been working with tapestries and considering this medium's possibilities, thinking about the sculptural aspects of this planimetric technique and also interested in what he sees as major characteristics within this representational system, aspects of communication and translation. Ideas like identity, dissolve identity, oral transmission, translation, genealogy, subjectivity and collective work are the conceptual axis for his exchanges with weavers.
