From 4 September to 8 December 2026, Valtopina, a small Umbrian town in the province of Perugia, once again becomes one of Italy’s centres for research into contemporary fiber art. Curated by Barbara Pavan and promoted by Scuola Ricamo Valtopina and the Municipality, the 3rd International Biennial of Contemporary Fiber Art brings together more than seventy artists through its main exhibition at the Museo del Ricamo e del Tessile and two collateral events extending the project beyond the museum.
At the heart of the Biennial is L’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle (The Love That Moves the Sun and the Other Stars), a title taken from the final verse of Dante’s Paradiso and concluding a research project begun in 2022. Nineteen international artists are invited to engage with a word that contemporary art almost seems to fear: love. Overused, overloaded with meanings and all too easily exposed to the risk of rhetoric.
The exhibition, however, avoids treating love simply as a feeling or an iconographic theme. Instead, love becomes a relational force to be explored in its many forms: care, responsibility, desire, belonging, vulnerability, conflict, loss and transformation. This choice allows the Biennial to address the subject without necessarily seeking to reconcile its contradictions.
One particularly effective introduction to this universe is provided by the shooting stars of Ise Cellier. In the series Rudder / Les Gouvernails, created between 2020 and 2021, the French artist sews and paints antique fabrics, incorporating tea bags and heterogeneous materials. These celestial forms become populated by faces, figures and small signs, turning into objects suspended between narrative, memory and desire.
The declared reference is François Coppée’s poem Étoiles filantes and that almost childlike, universal gesture of making a wish at the fleeting appearance of a shooting star. Cellier’s sky thus becomes primarily an inner one: the star is no longer simply something to be observed, but a kind of emotional map through which to navigate hope, expectation and loss.
Ise Cellier, from the series Rudder / Les Gouvernails, 2020–2021, sewing and painting on antique fabrics, tea bags and other mixed materials.
A very different register emerges in Resistance in Continuum (2026) by Iranian artist Parimah Avani. Thirty white baby garments hold fragments of bodies traced through industrial cleaning wipes, ink and adhesive. From a distance, the installation retains something apparently innocent: whiteness, infancy, clothing designed to receive and protect a newborn body. As one approaches, that reassurance disappears.
The nursery symbolically encounters the battlefield. Care, so often relegated to an invisible domestic sphere, is crossed by the trauma of war; what should protect life also becomes the place from which to resist its destruction. Love thus loses any abstract quality and becomes responsibility: protecting someone when protection itself becomes difficult.
Parimah Avani, Resistance in Continuum, 2026, industrial cleaning wipes, baby garments, ink, adhesive, 235 × 206 × 3 cm. Photo credit: Arta Shadman.
With Daniele Davitti, the discourse shifts again. Coltre dell’asino (The Donkey’s Cover, 2024) is a large blanket made by hand-embroidering and mending cotton thread and twine onto antique cotton and hemp. It is ideally conceived to adorn and protect a donkey: an animal that popular culture has turned into a synonym for stupidity and stubbornness is restored by the artist to its grace and dignity, as well as to the memory of the role its strength has played in sustaining different civilisations for centuries.
Around it, Davitti constructs a small textile cosmology. The donkey, a goat, the sun, fish, the tree of life and a large bird evoke the four elements — earth, fire, water and air — and an idea of harmony with human spirituality. Two verses from the Japanese song Always with Me also run along the border, chosen for their invitation to kindness, friendship and an understanding of life in its many facets.
Daniele Davitti, Coltre dell’asino, 2024, cotton thread and twine, hand-embroidered and mended on antique cotton and hemp, 140 × 95 cm. Photo credit: Lorenzo Michelin.
Among the most unsettling works is What A Boy Wants! by Ann Vollum. Reclaimed fabrics dyed using natural techniques and eco-printing, hand stitching, lace, sequins and beads construct a scene that might initially seem to belong to the reassuring domestic world of childhood. Yet at its centre, a boy plays in a murky pond populated by skeletal creatures, while above him looms a winged, dragon-like creature carrying a naked girl inside its belly.
Vollum deliberately creates an image suspended between fairy tale and nightmare. Even the lace border, recalling Victorian aesthetics and its imagery of family life, contributes to the ambiguity. What should protect can also imprison; the desire to protect can turn into control, care into possession, intimacy into an exercise of power. The work thus touches upon one of the Biennial’s most unsettling ideas: not everything we call love necessarily sets us free.
Cover image: Ann Vollum, What A Boy Wants!, reclaimed fabric dyed using eco-printing techniques, fabric, lace, embroidery threads, sequins, beads and liquid acrylics, 68.6 × 62.2 cm. Photo credit: Megan Maloy.
It is precisely the distance between such different works that makes the exhibition’s curatorial framework legible. There is no shared iconography of love, nor a predetermined message to which the artists are expected to conform. Rather, there is a common material through which to question it.
Textile, after all, is relational by its very nature. A thread can join, but it can also bind. We sew to construct and mend to repair; we can wrap something to protect it or tie it to prevent it from moving. Fabric preserves traces of bodies, labour and time. Embroidery, stitching, mending, appliqué and reuse thus become particularly effective tools for speaking about what connects individuals to one another and to the world.
It is precisely in Valtopina that this reflection acquires particular significance. Contemporary experimentation enters a place devoted to preserving and transmitting an ancient body of knowledge: the Museo del Ricamo e del Tessile and Scuola Ricamo preserve techniques belonging to Umbria’s textile heritage, while the Biennial, founded in 2022, brings them into dialogue with international artists, practices and sensibilities.
The question, then, is not simply to acknowledge the return of textiles in contemporary art, but to understand how ancient gestures can continue to speak about the present.
From the Museum to the Territory
The 3rd Biennial does not end with its main exhibition. Through Biennale OFF, the project expands into the “Stelvio Sbardella” Municipal Library and Valtopina Town Hall’s Council Chamber, bringing the overall number of participating artists to more than seventy and creating a route connecting the museum, civic spaces and the surrounding territory.
At the Library, from 4 to 6 September, Un tempo altro. Estetica della lentezza (Another Time. An Aesthetics of Slowness), curated by Barbara Pavan, brings pinhole photography into dialogue with Embroidery Art. Two apparently distant practices are united by their need for time: on one side, photographic images made without lenses or automated processes, through long exposures, waiting and unpredictability; on the other, the patient gesture of needle and thread. Each work results from an encounter between a photographer and a textile artist, making process and duration integral parts of the work itself.
The project therefore approaches slowness not as nostalgia, but as a form of attention in a present dominated by the increasingly rapid production and consumption of images. The venue itself takes on a precise significance: reading, pinhole photography and embroidery share an extended temporality shaped by concentration, presence and attention.
In the Council Chamber, also from 4 to 6 September, Soperchi Ornamenti, curated by Barbara Pavan and Monna Lisa Salvati, brings together nine international women artists around the theme of female headwear. Historically a marker of belonging, social status, religious prescription and control over the body, the head covering is transformed through fiber art into textile sculpture and reinterpreted as a possible symbol of freedom, creativity and self-determination.
It is above all the location in the Council Chamber that gives the project its strength: these sculptural headpieces enter spaces of public representation and decision-making that have historically been dominated by men. Textile therefore does not decorate an institutional space but questions it, bringing body, emancipation, difference and power into relation.
All this takes place in Umbria during the year marking the 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis. The Franciscan reference inevitably brings with it a reflection on our relationship with others and with creation, while Dante provides the main exhibition with the cosmic image through which to conclude the journey begun four years ago.
L’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle does not, however, present love as a solution, nor as consolation. It leaves it open as both a question and a possibility.
Perhaps it is precisely here that fiber art reveals one of its most contemporary qualities: thread does not erase a fracture; it crosses it. And when it stitches two edges back together, it leaves visible the place where they had been separated.
Information
3rd International Biennial of Contemporary Fiber Art – L’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
Museo del Ricamo e del Tessile, Via Gorizia 19-30, Valtopina (Perugia), Italy. Curated by Barbara Pavan; coordination by Maria Mancini. 4 September–8 December 2026. Opening: Friday 4 September at 11:30 a.m.; 5 and 6 September, open 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
Biennale OFF – Un tempo altro. Estetica della lentezza
“Stelvio Sbardella” Municipal Library, Valtopina (Perugia), Italy. Curated by Barbara Pavan. 4–6 September 2026. Opening: Friday 4 September at 11:30 a.m.; Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 September, 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
Biennale OFF – Soperchi Ornamenti
Council Chamber, Municipality of Valtopina, Valtopina (Perugia), Italy. Curated by Barbara Pavan and Monna Lisa Salvati; coordination by Maria Mancini. 4–6 September 2026. Opening: Friday 4 September at 11:30 a.m.; 5 and 6 September, 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
Information for all three events: +39 339 3407299 – mariavaltopina@virgilio.it. Catalogue published by Alt3Vie Editore.
