ILARIA MARGUTTI: ART AS A PRACTICE OF LISTENING, RESISTANCE, AND AWARENESS
| by Barbara Pavan |
Crossing the threshold of an artist’s studio is always an act charged with anticipation, like the beginning of a silent ritual. Every time, I wonder how much of the spirit, of the soul that manifests in the works, also inhabits the space in which they take shape.
In the case of Ilaria Margutti, this question becomes even more intense. Her research, in fact, moves within inner geographies with the same intensity with which it explores the complex immensity of the Universe. In her hands, the infinitely large is translated into an alphabet of dots within the minimal perimeter of an embroidery frame traversed by a needle and a single thread.
It is in this short circuit between vastness and essentiality that her two Studios are situated: distinct but interconnected places, one dedicated to the generative gesture — meticulous, patient, precise — and the other to suspension, to the time of waiting and of vision, a space that becomes a threshold, a liminal territory in which the work offers itself, the artist tells her story, and the observer’s gaze becomes part of the process.
A few weeks ago, with her, we started from the first studio, initiating a long conversation that led us from one work to another, following the invisible thread of projects born from a slow, meditative process, made of repeated gestures like a mantra, almost like a prayer. What emerged was a path made not only of artworks, but of thoughts, intuitions, reflections that sometimes surface only at the end, like the full meaning of a journey.
This studio visit gave birth to the following interview in which we tried to take stock of her path of artistic research and practice.
An artist and art history teacher, after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Margutti embarked on an intense and multifaceted artistic path, exhibiting in Italy and abroad, collaborating with private galleries, and actively dedicating herself to the promotion of contemporary art, also through initiatives such as “Incontri al Museo con l’Arte Contemporanea” and the major project “CASERMARCHEOLOGICA”, with the transformation — in collaboration with Laura Caruso — of Palazzo Muglioni, a former barracks, into an international cultural hub.
Her artistic research underwent a decisive turning point in 2007, when the encounter with Rosalba Pepi, a master embroiderer, opened up a new expressive dimension. From that moment, the practice of embroidery became deeply intertwined with her poetics, becoming medium and metaphor, ritual gesture and narrative tool.
Margutti conceives her research as a constant investigation, a weaving of time, rhythm, and silence. The act of embroidering becomes an act of listening, of reconciliation, a process that delves into the invisible and renders it visible with discretion, with patience. Her stylistic signature arises from the desire to deconstruct traditional stitches, refounding them into a new language, intimate and dense with meaning.
Through the thread, the artist constructs a practice that does not offer answers but opens directions, suspended between history and myth, between wound and healing, in a silent and powerful dialogue with matter and with time.
In her works, she does not seek to impose a univocal message. Rather, she allows the viewer to enter the territory of the work according to their own experience, if they are willing to exercise a gaze trained to silence and depth. Margutti questions the role of the artist in a fragmented and noisy society and invites us to reclaim the ability to listen, to truly see, beyond the surface.
With the series “Il filo dell’Imperfetto”, created over a decade ago, she began a body of work on trauma and healing. In those works, scars become lace: the wounds of others mended with respect and dedication, until they are transformed into symbols of resilient beauty. It is in this process that the artist felt her own transformation: crossed by the pain of others, she transcribed it with needle and thread, without yielding to pathos, but bearing its weight with conscious detachment.
Today, her research moves toward more subtle territories, where the invisible gains ever more space. Margutti explores the back of the canvas, writing, performative gesture, while color becomes increasingly absent, allowing the essential to emerge. The artwork, for her, remains always a process of crossing — not a conclusion, but an act of presence, fragile and luminous, in the shadow of time.
Here is what she told us…
Who is the artist Ilaria Margutti?
The “Ilaria” who is an artist feels like a presence that inhabits me — one that tries to keep me alert to the evolving world and to life itself, in its powerful creative and tragic dimensions. It’s like being watched over by a necessary inner obsession, helping me to resist the darkness of this historical moment and beyond.
In embroidering my canvases, I try to return to myself (and to anyone who recognizes it within themselves) a primordial absence — one I feel is filled only when I embroider, recognizing myself in that thread capable of weaving relationships, stories, knowledge, wounds, and galaxies. I cannot define myself with a single identity: I am an artist, a teacher, a listener to silence and the unseen. I feel so deeply intertwined with indeterminacy that only when I hold needle and thread in my hands do I perceive any sense of self.
After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, I moved through painting until I slipped into embroidery, as a form of thought. Since then, needle and thread have become my way of questioning the world. I feel like a temporary knot in a larger network, one of the many connections that weave life together. This is why my work arises from the desire to recompose the threads of what has unraveled—symbolically, across time, in bodies, and in memory. For me, art is an act of attention and responsibility. It is humanity’s opportunity to open itself to the infinite questions that shape and summon us.
Needle and thread: how much do they represent, today, tools of artistic practice, and how much a revolution in thought? How, in this sense, are they intertwined with your philosophy of life and with a “political” dimension of making art?
Needle and thread can no longer be considered merely tools; they are living presences, access routes to a form of thinking that does not separate body from mind or gesture from idea. For me, they are instruments of listening and transformation, essential as a medium to enter that state of thought that reclaims its complexity and depth — openings toward vastness. Each work is born from a long and dilated time, non-linear, which embraces waiting as a necessary foundation for generating meaning. In the act of embroidery, a silent revolution takes place, away from the noisy stages of protagonism that characterize this era. Embroidering, for me, means delving into the symbolic, into matter, into the wounds of Western thought.
For some months now, I’ve been discovering and exploring the research of Karen Barad, an American physicist and philosopher, who developed a radical theory of relationships starting in the late 1990s. According to Barad, separate entities do not exist — there are only relationships that generate reality. Every phenomenon is an intra-action between what exists and what questions it; it is a vision in which matter and meaning are intertwined, and every gesture becomes an ethical and political act.
In this sense, art — like science — is always political. Because everything that concerns relationships — with others, with the world, with Nature — is a political act. Every gesture we make resonates, transforms, alters the field in which we act. This is why I feel the need to question the meaning of my work with responsibility. I am not seeking an art that imposes itself, but one that evolves through time, matter, and thought.
I also want to mention Luce Irigaray, whom I’ve returned to reading lately, because she pointed to a path for restoring value to denied languages — those that do not impose themselves, but instead welcome by becoming a place. The feminine has been expelled from the canonical forms of knowledge; and yet, through gesture, breath, and repetition that is never the same, it can speak again, to recreate a landscape of listening to a forgotten, long-distant rhythm.
Embroidery, with its slowness and precision, stands in contrast to the present’s frenzy of production. It is misaligned, and precisely for this reason, it has often gone unheard, considered part of an ancient and outdated tradition. Yet, in its apparent marginality, it does not represent — it re-emerges. It reminds us that it has never been a decorative act, but rather the refuge of a long-overlooked feminine action, capable of safeguarding a disruptive force — the possibility of rewriting the world from another perspective, of weaving a narrative in which knowledge is not power, but relationship.
From the human to the universal dimension, passing through astronomy and physics: how has your artistic research evolved over time? What transformations has it undergone on a conceptual, technical, and methodological level?
My artistic research was born from a deeply human and personal need: to mend wounds, to question loss, to give visible form to what remains invisible in bonds, in memories, in remembrance, and in the forms of Nature.
At the beginning, the body was my wounded center, traversed by threads that sought meaning within silence. But over time, that body seemed to heal, it expanded, it ceased to belong solely to me, becoming a threshold toward the other and then beyond, until it became a cosmic body, part of a vaster system that continues to interrogate itself.
The transition from the intimate to the universal was not a leap, but a slow and necessary evolution.
The wound became a threshold, the hands instruments of observation, as if the thread could become a probe, a gaze that investigates. Astronomy and physics entered my practice not as themes to be represented, but as forms of thought that question the same void that also inhabits my canvases.
It was thanks to the encounter with the theories and discoveries of scientists such as Henrietta Leavitt, Grete Hermann, and Karen Barad that I began to perceive a profound correspondence between the gesture of embroidery and scientific research on themes of physics and astrophysics. They are both practices of patience, of measurement, of relationships, capable of touching the infinite while remaining still.
In this way, my path also changed. From autobiographical sign, it became a tool for an invisible cartography. The threads began to trace coordinates, constellations, and the reverse side of the canvases became part of the process, a generative space, like a quantum map or a fabric of hidden gravity.
Conceptually, today I move along a very porous boundary: between art and science, between symbolic and real, between visible and invisible. Method and material have changed along with me. Today I try to evoke, to allow the forms and words I feel to be urgent in this moment to emerge.
Art for me is a place of research, made up of questions to which no single answer is possible, where time expands and knowledge becomes relationship.
Because a stitched point is never just a point—it is an act of interconnection, a presence that vibrates between what we are and what we might become; it is a knot of correspondences.
Embroidery has historically been a practice linked to the feminine universe. How and to what extent does this gender dimension become part of your works?
Embroidery is an ancient language, always associated with the feminine. It is made of silent gestures, of waiting, of repetitions that do not shout, but persist. For centuries, it has been relegated to the shadows of art, confined to “domestic craft,” and right there, in that margin, it has grown like an underground force.
To embroider is my way of returning to that denied knowledge, but also of transfiguring it, turning it into an act of thought and freeing it from mere craft.
The gender dimension enters my work as both wound and possibility; it gathers the stories of what has been excluded from dominant languages—the female body, cyclical time, care, the unspoken—and opens itself as a space of freedom.
In that marginality, another way of knowing, of being, of acting can be born.
Luce Irigaray writes that the feminine has been exiled from philosophical language, which has always been shaped in a masculine, linear, and assertive form—but embroidery does not follow a straight line. It moves through knots, returns, deviations; it is an embodied thought that does not seek to explain, but to remain. It explores life and Nature without possessing it, encountering it with the tips of the fingers.
Each of my works is an attempt to restore dignity to this language of the body and of time, of silence and of presence.
Gender, in my work, is not a declaration but a vibration. I do not stage the feminine; I interrogate it and allow it to emerge. The figures I embroider—often self-portraits or faces of women friends—are floating presences. They appear and then disappear. Nameless goddesses, daughters of the infinite, witnesses to a story interrupted by writing.
Embroidering is my way of beginning to write it again.
Over the years, you have engaged with projects of relational and participatory art through the use of embroidery. What reflections have you developed about this form of making art? Is there a particular project that left an indelible mark on you?
Relational art, for me, is a natural extension of my gesture. If embroidery is an act of connection, opening it up to other bodies, other hands, other stories was a necessary step. When the thread passes from hand to hand, something happens that no solitary work can generate – together, a shared knowledge is built, a space of listening and reciprocity is opened, where art is no longer just expression, but living relationship.
Over the years, I have come to understand that embroidery, as a participatory practice, creates a context, a slow time in which one can speak, remain silent, remember – and each stitch becomes a testimony.
Art, in this sense, is never only the result, but the very process of being together, of engaging with one another, of symbolically mending the fractures in our society.
A profound reference for me is Maria Lai, an invisible and luminous master, who showed us how art can be a thread stretched between people, lightness a form of wisdom, and how every gesture can be an act of transformation.
A project born from a shared vision is precisely CasermArcheologica, a public, abandoned, and decommissioned space that, together with my students and Laura Caruso — co-founder and now project manager — we returned to the city, transforming it into a laboratory of thought and creation.
It was there that I first understood the generative power of the collective process, the possibility of making the desires and needs of a community visible through the making of Art.
The community canvases emerged within the transformation process of CasermArcheologica. These are large-scale canvases where each participant embroiders their own emotional and symbolic path.
I create them in different places and contexts, whenever I am invited for a residency or a workshop. They are always different because they adapt to the people who make them — they are their stories, their territories, their symbols that bring to light desires and potential.
Each time a group embroiders together, a kind of choral weaving is born, as every thread carries the trace of a path, a memory, a desire. In this collectivity, I feel a very powerful, deep political force — a form of resistance. Another way of being in the world.
Participatory art has taught me that what remains is not just the artwork, but the bond — the relationship is the true work. Embroidery becomes a pretext to weave questions, trust, responsibility; it forges connections, opens spaces, and restores meaning.
How does art intertwine with your daily life? To what extent is it an essential and indispensable element for you?
For me, there is no separation between art and life. They are the same breath, the same way of being in the world, of observing it, of listening to it. I believe life is the opportunity we have to recognize ourselves in resonance with the world, to re-establish our rhythm with the universe, to investigate it, to ask it questions within the interference of expanding unknown space—because it is there that we can begin to heal the wound caused by life itself.*
When I walk, listen, teach — I am always living within art. It is the gaze that inhabits me and that I cannot switch off, because the works are always born from my experience — not to represent it, but to transform it. That is why I search within the signs of existence, within resonances and suspended questions.
Embroidery, for me, is more than a symbolic or cathartic gesture. It is a force that regenerates itself through repetition, almost like a prayer waiting to be heard. The maps, the figures, the forms that emerge from my work are nothing more than tangible traces of my questions — questions that arise from an existence intertwined with thought, with the body, with time that expands endlessly, yet is in continuous transformation.
School, too, is part of this weave. Teaching in a scientific high school, I often find myself facing young women and men who do not know they possess creative and emotional potential, but they discover it as they grow – sometimes they accept it, other times they flee from it for fear of being judged. I observe how they change, year after year, generation after generation. I learn a great deal from them. That is why it sometimes happens that they become part of my works, becoming involved in my artistic processes. Art, for me, is an essential elemen — it is the form of my thought, the way I understand reality. It is the only language I know to question the invisible, to not succumb to frenzy, to remain alert and sensitive even when the world becomes opaque. I cannot imagine my life otherwise, because it would mean crossing through it with no possibility of transformation. And when I embroider, I do so with the urgency of restoring body, presence, and memory to a broken thread.
*This wound is not an error to be corrected, but the original condition of our existence: separation, not-knowing, being part of a whole that escapes us. Healing it does not mean eliminating it, but recognizing it, moving through it, listening to it. It is precisely in that void — between what we are and what we do not understand — that we can open a space of care, where art, questioning, and thought become open gestures that transform.
Embroidery is a technique that requires precision and patience: what does time mean to you? And is there a cathartic, almost sacred component in the meticulous repetition of the gesture?
The question of time is complex, because I always tend to approach it in terms of how I experience it within the dimension of embroidery, and how I explore it through various interpretations of quantum mechanics and astronomy. It is certainly not something that can be defined as a straight line; I perceive it as a dense substance that expands and deepens as I work. When I embroider, I enter an altered state — time does not flow, it becomes space. It becomes listening. It is as if each stitch opens a fissure, a passage, in which something happens — whether it is a thought, a memory, an intuition, or a new journey.
There is indeed a cathartic component, but it is not a liberation — it is a passage. The repetition of the gesture does not serve to detach, but to remain within, to mend what in life has been torn or worn down.
It is a gesture that puts me in a state of listening, that anchors me and elevates me at the same time. I believe there is something sacred in the slow precision of embroidery — as total presence, in a state of absolute attentiveness, in which mind and body coincide. Embroidery is never automatic because each stitch is a decision, a responsibility, a bond that is renewed. It is a continuous mental dialogue between my hand, the thread, and the void.
It is there that time reveals itself as living matter, as an active element of the process. As I mentioned earlier, each work demands a long time, composed of waiting and returning, and I cannot accelerate it. I must be fully present in this slowness, because I feel that something happens which escapes the logic of efficiency — something that resembles knowledge, but also prayer. A time that is not measured, nor even measurable.
In recent years, you have created two major cycles of works — monumental both for the complexity of their conceptual research and for their technical precision. Could you tell me about these two projects: how they were born, how they developed, and what meanings they carry?
Recently, my research has turned toward more scientific themes — toward the cosmos, toward thought that questions origins and the invisible. This shift gave rise to two fundamental cycles: Le Variabili del Cigno (The Swan Variables) and Laniakea. Both are rooted in a desire to transform embroidery into a tool of cosmological and relational inquiry.
The Le Variabili del Cigno cycle was born from the study conducted by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, an American astronomer and mathematician who, by observing photographic plates of Cepheid variable stars, discovered the law that made it possible to measure distances between celestial bodies. An invisible woman in her time, yet one who allowed us to see farther, making the universe three-dimensional. I felt a strong correspondence between her work and mine — both of us immersed in repetitive, methodical gestures, still in body, but journeying through discovery. In these works, I embroidered the coordinates of the stars she studied, composing galaxies visible on the front of the canvas, while allowing the invisible network of threads to emerge on the back, attempting to create a metaphor for dark matter, but also for the connections we cannot perceive with the senses.
Subsequently, Laniakea was born — a composition of 25 pieces, all hand-embroidered on double-layered fabric, inspired by the map of galactic superclusters, a complex and fascinating cosmic structure which, in Hawaiian, means “immense heaven.” In this series, I let the thread’s material evoke an invisible yet present universe, like a territory to explore. Laniakea is the idea of an inverted cosmos, in which its true interwoven structure is revealed.
These two projects then opened the way to a broader cycle, still in evolution: Figlie dell’Infinito (Daughters of the Infinite). In this series, the female figure resurfaces in a state of suspension. It is a presence that inhabits the margin, that claims the relationship between the elements of Nature, and resists disappearance.
The works are informed by my latest readings (Maria Gimbutas, Karen Barad, Luce Irigaray), but they were especially inspired by the research of a forgotten scientist, Grete Hermann, who was the first to propose a relational quantum physics.
All of my reflection on time, on responsibility, on the possibility of mending the world through gestures that do not dominate but re-exist, is accompanied by the silent legacy of women — pioneers of unheard theories — who helped to open a breach in the scientific and philosophical debate dominated by a linear and univocal vision of knowledge.
At this moment, I am working precisely on the myth of Antigone by Sophocles, revisiting the philosophical interpretation given by Luce Irigaray in her book In the Beginning, She Was. I am embroidering an imaginary dialogue between myself and Antigone, to question her and bring back to light a gesture that shifts the way we perceive the feminine — not as domestic hearth, but as a force of resistance and transformation, capable of generating a new symbolic order. In this creative process, I am involving some of my students.
In all these cycles, embroidery has become map, measure, instrument of knowledge. But also an act of memory and resonance, in an attempt to poetically inhabit the cosmos — without erasing the wounds of the Earth.
Technology, hyperconnectivity, artificial intelligence: how do you imagine the destiny of art will transform in the coming years, and how are the rapid changes currently taking place influencing your artistic practice and research?
It’s a demanding question, but I’ll try to answer it, fully aware that even just “two weeks” from now I might wish to say something entirely different, given the dynamics of the present moment… anything can happen. We live in an accelerated time, in which everything is a threshold that seems accessible, duplicable, infinitely shareable. And yet, more than ever, I feel the need to remain within the slowness of gesture, to dwell in the body and in the material. Not out of nostalgia, but by choice.
Technology offers us immense possibilities, but it also risks turning us into passive spectators, consumers of experiences rather than creators of meaning. In this scenario, art has already become entertainment. But I believe it is still possible to generate a space that has the power to question us, where time is not merely productivity, but a place in which to pause and give form to meaning.
That is why I feel my work only has value if it preserves a form of resistance in slowness and density. It’s not about denying technology, but about proposing a different stance, a dialogue that arises from an active listening to the transformation taking place.
Artificial intelligence questions me deeply. On one hand, it can be an amplifier of possibilities, a mirror in which to reflect ourselves, a way to expand the field of thought; on the other hand, it carries the risk of disembodiment, a loss of limits, of error, of imperfection — all principles that are part of the deeper meaning of life.
As with anything created by human beings, the danger does not lie in use, but in the unconscious abuse of tools. The risk is that of extinguishing complex and creative thinking, delegating what we perceive as a limit, atrophying intellectual elasticity — both rational and imaginative.
The rhythm of our nature does not align with the dizzying pace of technological evolution, and for this reason we suffer the breathlessness of hyperconnectivity, which distracts and dulls us.
Perhaps — and I hope — that the art of the future will be able to keep us alert within the vibration of the tension that arises from surpassing our own limits, embracing imperfection as an evolutionary potential.
But in truth, I don’t know where we are headed. I only know that I still need to question the world and life with needle and thread, in the slowness of a time necessary to cultivate awareness.
