Dal 29 August to 27 September 2026, il MARATÈ – Museum for the Art of Copper and Textiles of Isili, for the first time in Sardinia and on the occasion of the dance festival On Site, hosts a personal exhibition by Renzo Francabandera entitled Contemporary archaeologies – Plots of the present, an exhibition project that intertwines some works from the artist's previous cycle, Archeology of the present with a series of unpublished works conceived expressly for the museum on the occasion of the festival.
The exhibition arises from the encounter between two ways of building memory through matter.
On the one hand, the heritage guarded by MARATÈ: the tradition of copper working, unique in Sardinia, the culture of the fabric, the knowledge of artisan workshops and weavers, the tools of daily work that have defined the identity of the Isile community for centuries. On the other, Francabandera's artistic research, That observe he reworks contemporary objects in his studio works and recounts live art events in live painting, as if they already belonged to an archaeological excavation of the future.
The meeting between these two universes does not produce a simple juxtaposition between ancient and contemporary, but a dialogue in which the museum itself becomes a space for questioning the present. If copper utensils, i telai, the tapestries and tools preserved by MARATÈ testify to the duration of a material culture, Francabandera's works suggest what they might be, Tomorrow, the traces of ours.
In MARATÉ the weft is not just that of the loom.
It is the structure that holds a community together, technical knowledge, a language, a memory. In conjunction with the In Situ dance festival promoted by Gruppo E-motion, for the first time in Sardinia the works of Renzo Francabandera enter this symbolic system as relics of a time still in progress, polaroids of landscapes just experienced. Everyday objects, the colors, the contemporary materials that constitute the project Archeology of the present are linked to the artistic events of the festival, also with actions of in live painting dell’artista, scheduled on the day 29 August, and thus tell of a long continuity of practices: from the dance of the performers that takes place during the Festival, to copper worked in the Isile workshops, to fabric as an identity device: the artisanal gesture that transforms matter into heritage.
In fact, Francabandera also created some unpublished works for Isili, conceived not as citations of local tradition but as contemporary answers to the questions that it continues to ask: what it means today to build memory through the living dialogue between art and matter? What will be the landscapes and objects that will tell the tale of our civilization tomorrow just as copper does today, the tapestries and loom tools tell of that of previous generations? The exhibition thus becomes a mutual crossing: the museum reads the present of art and the present interprets the museum.
il 29 AUGUST hours 21:00 at the Teatro Sant'Antonio the artist will be engaged in LIVE PAINTING