Fango | Studio Atzori

FANGO is a long-term project created specifically for La Manufacture de Roubaix.

It draws inspiration from Roubaix’s industrial activity, which profoundly influenced the lives of thousands of workers and their descendants. The decline of industry left a lasting mark on the community. The internal dynamics of the factories are the starting point of the exhibition.

Conceived as a life-size diorama, the installation recreates the scene of a village square, animated by ordinary figures absorbed in their daily activities. These life-size human sculptures are the result of a collaboration between textile art and the visual arts. They give shape to a fragment of suspended reality, where normality is only an appearance.

Through this device, the work questions the most diffuse and ordinary forms of power: not the frontal and institutional kind, but the kind that infiltrates interpersonal relationships underground, imposes itself in social roles, and slips into the almost imperceptible gestures of communal life. A discreet but omnipresent power, capillary and everyday, which shapes behaviors, redraws hierarchies, and structures collective existence in an invisible way.

Milena and Robberto from Studio Atzori are the winners of the Manufacture prize at the fourth Objet Textile biennial.