Images have always been a more universal language than written text. But what stories can textile creations tell us? The Festival International des Textiles Extraordinaires (FITE), an international festival of extraordinary textiles that first opened one decade ago in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and which continues to generate a great deal of interest, clearly demonstrates that textiles can be a wonderful means of sharing of personal and collective stories.
This unique international meeting place has become an important space for freedom and creativity, bringing together a vast community of creators from as many as five continents. Last year, the festival’s organizers asked us all to imagine: a different shared history and a new world where nature and the environment were cherished and cared for; a different way of consumption, new artistic practices, and a new body and new materials.
The theme and title of this biennial international festival is “IMAGINE!” and the partner country this year is Lithuania. In cooperation with the Lithuanian National Museum, the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and FITE, works of art will be brought to the National Museum’s House of Histories where, beginning on June 7th, it will be possible to see not only the contemporary textile works of Lithuanian artists, but also creations from Zimbabwe, Benin, Angola, Portugal, Morocco, France, the Netherlands, Estonia, Brazil, South Korea, Peru, Indonesia, and countries.
The organizers of this exhibition invite you to broaden your horizons and try to imagine humans as textile metaphors and works of textile art as expressions of activism and political acts; to discover links or deconstructions between tradition and the present day; and to search for differences and similarities between disparate cultures, as historical museum exhibits from the collections of the Bargoin Museum of Textiles and Archaeology and the National Museum of Lithuania, displayed alongside contemporary works, create conceptual links that defy time. Finally, the exhibited textile works will inspire you to ponder our shared future.
