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dritto, rovescio
BA 2 KASK (2024 - 2025)
Dritto, rovescio is a project developed during the first semester of my second bachelor year, exploring motif and print through techniques such as transfer and screen printing. This textile project began with one word: motif. But before I could begin, I found myself caught between motif and motive. In textiles, a motif is a repeated design or form. I wanted to go deeper: what is my motive, and what drives me to create?
This question led me inward. I reflected on the patterns that recur in my life, the people and memories that shape me, and the stories and objects that brought me to textile design. My focus became clear: the intimate traces of personal and cultural memory. I had been particularly fascinated by my Italian grandmother’s old photographs. Their mysterious silence and suspended quality, caught between grain and light, felt like something hidden just beneath the surface. I wanted to translate that feeling into textile.
This project allowed three parts of my practice to meet: analog photography, textile, and film. It was a moment where my own creative language emerged. I experimented widely: darkroom work, cyanotype, transfer and digital prints, screen printing, and even bringing my old sewing machine back into use. Through this process, I realized that perfection is not necessary for meaning; the journey, the messy, intuitive exploration, is as important as the final result, perhaps even more so.
Dritto, rovescio is therefore a reflection of what quietly repeats inside me, the textures of memory, and the personal and cultural motifs that drive my work. It represents both a personal and creative growth, and the courage to take up space and share my practice with others.
In her first short film, dritto, rovescio (knit, purl), Martha Battistella portrays her nonna in her familiar surroundings in Vigevano, Italy. This intimate film is a search for the deeply intertwined bond between Martha and her nonna, Maddalena, who is the greatest source of inspiration for her work. Maddalena expresses her love for her grandchildren through textiles—a subtle, symbolic language full of meaning. Gradually, Martha tries to understand this language. In her artistic practice, she seeks her own way to respond to it.
In addition to the film, I wrote a reflective text to be read alongside it, in dialogue with the images. The text is called Allegoria dell’amore and is inspired by the loving dynamic that is made explicit through the use of visual language. Please note that this is a literary and metaphorical translation of the work, and not a literal transcript. For literary motives, the story is modified and romanticized (although, in my experience, the metaphors en feelings are adequate as to what my perception of this place and axperience that i’m explaining is)