The Monumentality of the Everyday

Jakup Ferri will present paintings, embroideries and carpets at the Biennale Arte 2022 – in an exhibition entitled The Monumentality of the Everyday. Ferri’s drawings are mostly depicting everyday scenes involving animals, children, acrobats, musicians, and sports activities (like swimming, snorkeling, bicycling). And then there is this aspect of the vernacular turning into the surreal, or magic, like animals speaking or making music, people turning into birds, people making music for animals or even becoming animals or hybrid creatures. Very often, there’s silent, even poetic interactions or dialogues between two people or two things. Ferri’s works are inspired by children’s drawings, folk art, and so-called outsider art.

We see intimate scenes from everyday life, with joyous protagonists, mostly in bright colors. Recently, Ferri also became interested in topics like mobility and in utopian architecture from the 1960s, like Archigram’s Walking City. Originally working with drawings, about ten years ago the artist started turning these drawings into various media: paintings, embroideries and carpets. For the textile works, he has found amazing collaborators: Women from Albania, Kosovo, Burkina Faso, and Suriname, with whom the artist realized carpets and embroideries in traditional techniques like cross work, tentene, hand embroidery, goblen, etc. Ferri considers carpet-making and embroidering not only as a way of producing a textile product, but also as a technique of social interaction, coherence, and community building. And, maybe, a way of reactivating old crafts, and keeping traditional (if not ancient) knowledge alive.