international tapestry city award

The International Tapestry City in Aubusson, with the support of Haltra Communities, is launching a call for projects on the theme:

The Echo Chamber 1925 – 2025, woven space: Woven objects fair, decorative arts paradise or contemporary Period room?

For the past twelve years, the Cité internationale de la tapisserie in Aubusson has been pursuing a policy of creation, promoting this expertise, which is classified as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, and at the same time enriching the contemporary collection of the museum.

Eva Nielsen, Clément Cogitore, Mathieu Mercier, Marie Sirgue, El Seed, Raphaël Barontini, Amélie Bertrand, Thomas Bayrle, in particular, winners of the various calls for projects have created textile works whose scale, deployment and diversity salute tapestry as a contemporary artistic medium.

With the same energy, the creation of two large hangings around the works of JRR Tolkien and Hayao Miyazaki extends the history of textile imaginations in tapestries of monumental proportions. A current public artistic commission "Hommage à George Sand", entrusted to Françoise Pétrovitch, will project the tapestry medium into the world of monumental installation.

The Cité de la tapisserie, in a logic of research and development, continues to enthusiastically explore the artistic writing of its textile identity and deploys the tapestry medium again and elsewhere. As the Cité is currently doing with Gaspar Willmann and his work woven in jacquard, a pictorial homage to a historical figure of the territories of New Aquitaine.

Historically, tapestry carries the program of a story, of an assumed figuration that develops in the interior, domestic space, a subject represented and given to read. The place and decorative function of woven objects are central in the distribution of living spaces. Finally, tapestry, as a living medium of creation, has taken a liking to updating its writing over the course of new models of reality: an echo chamber of images and thoughts of the world. In view of the 100th anniversary, in 2025, of the great international exhibition of decorative arts in Paris, that of 1925, the 2025 call for projects invites artists to think of images woven in constellation on the surfaces of a space.

Candidates will have to choose one of the following three approaches:

• Woven Objects Exhibition (a perspective on the author's writing, declined and applied to the surface of a plurality of objects, with the spirit of a unity or a coordinate as we can hear it in textile creation)
• Decorative arts paradise (in a logic of assembly, coordinate know-how and the diversity of materials to build the room of an art of the arts of living)
• Period room of the future (in a prospective dimension of the scenario and fiction – design fiction – which accompanies the decorative ensemble.)

For all three subjects, particular attention will be paid to the way in which contemporary images and imaginations will be used by candidates in their proposals.