At the end of the eighties in New York, was born a place that would become a historic landmark for musicians who escape from the traditional jazz trends. This alternative space owes its name to a group, Mr. Blutdstein's Knitting Factory, inspired by the sweater factory, where one of the members had worked for several years. Simplified Knitting Factory is today recognized as an international label, is the result of a mixture of desire and reckless risks, or that particular zeitgeist that had generated a few years before the explosion of art on the Lower East Side. Factory in the manner of Warhol, the local Houston Street was able to sew a fabric centered on improvisation music thanks to the perseverance of the founders and the contribution of the musicians who have trod the stage, creating a current that has become the movement, style, trends, while maintaining a certain transversality to the system. The Knitting Factory is a model of independent creativity, collective, rhizomatic and successful, which could be compared, move to the front of the visual arts applied to the field of social, with what is happening for some years now in Belgium, the Atelier The Hesse Vielsalm. Here, behind the careful direction of Anne-Françoise Rouche, a team of artists from different horizons core activities of drawing, painting, engraving, sculpture, video, animation and music aimed at residents of a center for people with psycho-physical handicaps. Thanks to everyone's daily life and the extraordinary synergies that are created by working closely, this permanent laboratory has allowed many artists to consolidate a mentally handicapped individual style precise, original, unique. But what most distinguishes this factory in the remote forests of the Ardennes is the choice to accept in its ranks a greater number of artists in residence, allowing the creative experiences of land for the daily feeding of mature new impulses. This is the case of the yard started in the summer of 2009 around the theme of sewing and doll and dolls called Knitting, which saw the team of Hesse deal with artists from the Walloon, Flemish and Italian in a fertile exchange. Hybrids made people here and collected in this catalog marked a turning point in working practices and types of production that characterize the creation of workshops aimed at persons in disabilities or mental health problems. A certain prudishness derived in part from the turning of the users of workshops with the authors of Art Brut, whose creative genius is considered to be proportional to social isolation and cultural and partly by the aura that surrounds players system of contemporary art, usually makes to discourage contact between these two worlds, reinforcing the exclusion of one and the other from the social fabric. At the crossroads of these two extremes, the residencies of Hesse involving the forces of creative artists who are neither mainstream nor bruts, and that while coming from distant worlds gather together to realize a new work, a product both individual and ensemble, following the rules of improvisational performance based on listening and responding (Réplique). That this performance has adapted then place in the premises of a former military barracks where the forced cohabitation has given way to the pleasure of sharing, and has as a sewing thread, a metaphor for the care of the bond, all this is to square the circle. As Anne-Françoise Rouche points in his submission, the Knitting dolls workshop was born from the desire to explore a new medium and learn a new technique, creating continuity with the images previously processed in labs drawing and painting. The four workshops involved in this process have infused the common touch of their special artistic personality. The line of wire drawing and sewing come together to create quirky characters that live human characters, animals or aliens, inspired by a visual model reinvented in a soft third dimension. Originally
of this procedure based on a play of the brand found "Zero Madness", created in 2008 in the studios Blue Camel by Clara and Richard Bargellini Rota with a view to finding a plan of meeting between graphics and painting on the one hand , sewing and laundering of the fabric on the other .... (Teresa Maranzano)
Friday, December 4, 2009, and 'opened the exhibition "Dolls Knitting" at the exhibition space of WIT.H its new headquarters in Kortrijk, Belgium.
Artists exhibited: Rita Arimoto, Adolpho Avril, Richard Bargas, Anne-Sophie Bomal, Maria Cristina Cappelli, Laura Delvaux, Annemie Deppaupe, Giuliana Gironi, Hendrik Heffinck, Lia Hes, Lindsy Mervylde, Florence Monfort, Bart Vandevijvere, Florence Monfort, Patrick Perin, Noemie Ralet, Christine Remacle, Clara Rota, Manuela Sagona, Elise Sironval, Bart Vandevijvere, Alex Vitti, Aurelie William Levaux.
Upcoming Shows: Brussels, Vielsalm, Geneva and Milan
