Textile Poetics of Entanglements: The Works of Antonella Anedda and Maria Lai

Abstract

By looking at the works of the poet Antonella Anedda (b. Rome, 1955) and the artist Maria Lai (Ulassi, 1919–Cardedu, 2013), this study investigates the relationship between poetic texts and textiles, contending that the ‘intra-action’ – to use the feminist physicist Karen Barad’s term – between the language of poetry and that of textile can be understood through a paradigm of entanglements that expands the semantic capacity of both words and textiles. One main objective of this study is to re-think the genre of lyric poetry and some of its core generic markers, in particular apostrophe, rhythm, and repetition, in light of a focus on materiality and tactility; this shall problematise ideas of linearity and completeness in favour of notions of movement, instability, and tactility. This will enable us to propose new parameters that allow for conceptualisation of textile poems and the textile poetics of entanglement that they articulate.