With her Finnish floor loom Varpapuu Zhenya Machneva weaves her tapestries with colored cotton, linen and synthetic yarns creating detailed renderings of machinery she photographed in old factories or in abandoned industrial ports around St. Petersburg. Released from their first purpose and shamelessly anthropomorphized, the machines woven by Machneva become imaginative, blurred and touching evidence of the disappearance of the powerful Russian manufacturing sector after the fall of the Soviet Union. For Machneva the artisanal practice of tapestry and its images of factories are a form of resistance to mass production and to the speed of our time. Imaginary landscapes of a future past.
