Ricamando il Caos
Light Installations
2018 - 2023
Ricamando il Caos (Embroidering Chaos) is a project that develops on the basis of chaos and complexity theory. It is a series of light installations in which writing becomes visual matter. Handwritten texts are imprinted onto transparent surfaces, layered and backlit with LED lights. Light filters through the words, transforming them into luminous lace, into textures that recall neuronal networks, vegetation, constellations.
The project originates from a reflection on the etymology of the word text, from the Latin textus, “woven.” The etymological meaning functions as a constructive principle. The text literally becomes a weaving, a surface made of many interlaced words that acquire meaning only through being together, like the threads of a fabric in continuous expansion.
Chaos and Embroidery
The title of the project brings together two gestures that appear to be opposite. Chaos evokes unpredictability, disorder, that which escapes control. Embroidery, instead, recalls patience, repetition, and the human attempt to give form and order. In Carolina Lombardi’s work, these two poles do not oppose one another, they enter into dialogue.
Here, chaos is not disorder, but a dynamic field of relationships in continuous transformation, that complexity which contemporary science has learned to recognise as a founding principle of reality, from cosmic structures to living systems. Embroidery is the gesture that seeks to trace these connections, to make them visible, a patient and reiterated act that reorders and organises while keeping open the possibility of new configurations.
Ink and pencil drawings. Study of nets and weaves.
From Language to Relation
When one approaches the works, the instinct is to read the texts, but meaning slides into non-sense. The disorientation is intentional.
The aim is not to communicate a message through words, but to strip language of its anthropocentric primacy, the claim of being the privileged, superior form of communication. The syntactic and semantic connections that normally hold together the meaning of a sentence are intentionally emptied of their logical-narrative value. What remains are connections in a broader sense, relational and visual.
Citing Gregory Bateson: “ We could say that a word stands in a certain relationship to a noun, its subject and so on. At the core of the definition could lie the relationship itself”.
Non-sense thus becomes a space of possibility. Meaning withdraws and allows the signifier to emerge. No longer “what the text says,” but “how it connects”, the very texture of the relationships between signs. Human language is suspended to open onto a broader and more universal communicative dimension, that of neurons exchanging electrical signals, of cells communicating through chemical messengers, of tree roots dialoguing through mycorrhizal networks, of molecules interacting according to physical and energetic dynamics.
Drawing in coloured inks, based on natural structures.
Light, Networks, Complexity
The LED backlighting filters selectively. From this differentiated illumination emerge images that were neither planned nor drawn: rhizomatic, tangled, multiple figures. These are forms that arise from the letters themselves, from their density, overlapping, reproducing what happens within a complex system.
What appears are networks, nodes, and branches, textures that recall the interconnected structure of reality. Light thus assumes a structural role, it makes perceptible relational energy, that force which runs through every form of life.
The works originate from drawings and photographs, some taken by the artist: images of vegetal structures, rocks, cracks, fish scales, veins, and urban fabrics, used to identify fractal geometries and recurring forms. These are patterns that repeat from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. The same branching logic is found in galaxies as in the veins of a leaf, in brain circuits as in tree roots or in the articulation of a text. This recurrence suggests a profound continuity between micro and macrocosm, between Nature and Culture, understood no longer as opposing realms, but as dimensions of a single network in becoming.
As Valerio Eletti, president of the Complexity Education Project, observes, “Carolina embroiders complex systems: she makes parallel visual planes interact with one another, without hierarchy, playing with letters and light, with space and with a plurality of interrelated territories.” The works give form to interweavings from which unexpected patterns emerge, without linear planning, the result of interactions among many correlated elements and successive layers. Simplifying these systems would mean stripping them of their capacity to generate new forms, disarming their generative power.
Reference photographs by C. Lombardi
Installations as Constellations
At the Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum, where the works were exhibited from 22 November 2023 to 16 February 2024, the light installations reference one another across the rooms, interacting and creating resonances. As Maria Giuseppina Di Monte, director of the Andersen Museum and co-curator of the exhibition, writes, the luminous threads function “like organs or systems of a single body in movement and constant evolution.” The experience “is more musical than narrative,” made of rhythms, pauses, pulsations, and returns.
“Through a selection of some of the bold luminous structures that together form a constellation, the Museum galleries come alive”.
Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum (photo Niccolò Ara)
Weaving the Living
Carolina Lombardi’s work refers to an ecological sensitivity, far from any human centrality. The human being is not the centre and dominator of the world here, but a “simple cohabitant of planet Earth, [...] an integral part of a universe in which to seek a new harmony,” writes Gabriele Simongini in the catalogue of the exhibition Embroidering Chaos.
The exhibition at the Andersen Museum is configured as a space of dialogue between art and science, enriched by contributions from scholars from different disciplines: astrophysics, chemistry, and nanotechnologies. The project itself, like the networks that traverse it, connects forms of knowledge, forms of life, and different levels of reality into a single fabric.
Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum (photo Gerald Bruneau)
Exhibition
The project Embroidering Chaos was presented at the Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum, Rome, from 22 November 2023 to 16 February 2024.
Carolina Lombardi, Ricamando il Caos, Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum, Rome on RAI Cultura web page.