The International Festival of Extraordinary Textiles (FITE) proposes this unique event by creating an international stage to promote textiles with strong heritage and cultural meanings.
The ability to visualise images from sensory or abstract perceptions, a sensitive form resulting from direct experience, imagination leads to a proposal, and once it is shared, it is a common project to follow for a better humanity. Like an injunction, the exclamation mark invites artists to entrust us with their suggestions, crazy or utopian, for tomorrow and for improving human skills, while preserving our planet.
For this edition, the FITE is celebrating its 10th anniversary. It wishes to give free rein to new imaginations, nourished by lucid hopes, rejecting beatitude and capitulation. FITE proposes to rise up against submission and resignation to the cynical vision of the future. It makes hope a revolutionary, "kindness a political act" and places human emotions and feelings at the centre (Alexandra Rowland). In its main exhibition, FITE will propose to the artists to imagine another common history, a new world that is concerned with the environment, new artistic practices and new consumption, a new body and new materials to adorn it, a new world where humour and illusion intersect. FITE defends a space of freedom and creativity from which imagination is born, a tool for emancipation and social transformation. In 2022 Clermont-Ferrand will come alive around this reflection, while in 2023, the FITE will travel to several Lithuanian cities (Vilnius, Klaipeda, Kaunas, etc.) to present the work carried out in collaboration with the Vilnius Academy of Arts and a selection of international artists.
