A winding alley between the buildings from Campo San Polo to the Canal Grande leads to Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, home of the Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro. Here, an all-female exhibition, a Collateral Event of the 2024 Biennale Arte, is taking place. Titled “Per non perdere il filo,” and curated by Daniela Ferretti, the exhibition presents an intimate and universal journey that is both personal and collective, featuring Karine N’Guyen Van Tham and Parul Thacker. What unites these two artists is their shared passion for weaving, embroidery, and creating hand-made works with extraordinary narrative power. This artisanal gesture, which involves joining threads, crafting pieces of fabric, inventing embroidered shapes, and imbuing them with significant meaning, is rooted in an ancient Venetian tradition known as “far filò.” The term “filò” presumably derives from “filare,” the work women did together in barns, mountains, or plains during the cold season. These gatherings allowed them to stay warm, spend time together, recite the Rosary, perform small manual tasks, and discuss everything and nothing with neighbors, “contraenti,” relatives, and passersby. Thus, “far filò” means to chat, recount, preserve, and transmit knowledge, traditions, and stories. Karine N’Guyen Van Tham and Parul Thacker connect personally and artistically through this tradition, this thread that aims to unite all visitors to the exhibition, regardless of their origin.

Parul Thacker has long been fascinated by the scientific and creative potential of materials. Her works, almost algorithmic in nature, are made of precious metals, minerals, and wooden objects. Straddling the line between painting and sculpture, her inclassifiable pieces evoke prayer, patience, and contemplation. The installation on the ground floor of the Palazzo is particularly evocative: 21 large silk organza canvases, whose embroidery recalls the topography of the Arctic region where the artist was in residence, are displayed in close sequence and accompanied by a musical backdrop of notes from a rudra veena (an Indian string instrument) and sounds from the waters of Spitsbergen, Norway.

Karine N’Guyen Van Tham draws from stories, snippets of life, or invented or lived experiences. She creates texts of extreme poetry, handwritten on aged paper and placed next to her installations, folded in half so that visitors can decipher only a small part. Her works are garments, carriers of memory as they still bear the imprint of the bodies that wore them, even if they are no longer present. Entirely hand-made on a small loom from linen thread, the artist creates fabric strips and colors in indigo blue, red, and ochre. At the end of the exhibition, each visitor is invited to leave a piece of thread that belongs to them. All the threads, gathered into a single skein, will be used by Karine N’Guyen Van Tham to create a unique piece, symbolically weaving together all the visitors.