The Museo del Ricamo e del Tessile di Valtopina is hosting the 3rd International Biennial of Contemporary Fiber Art, promoted by the Scuola Ricamo Valtopina and the Municipality of Valtopina, with the support and patronage of the Umbria Region, the Province of Perugia, CEDRAV, Umbria Ecomusei, the Umbria Chamber of Commerce, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Foligno, Club UNESCO Foligno, and Fonti del Clitunno ODV.
Curated by Barbara Pavan, the Biennial brings to a close a research journey that began in 2022, exploring the social, cultural, and political transformations of the present through the language of contemporary fiber art.
The third edition, entitled L’AMOR CHE MOVE IL SOLE E L’ALTRE STELLE, takes its title from the final line of Dante Alighieri’s “Paradiso” and places at its centre a word that is both universal and deeply complex: love.
The guided tour offers an opportunity to explore the curatorial project and the works on display in greater depth, considering love not as an idealised sentiment, but as a force capable of generating relationships, care, responsibility, belonging, conflict, and transformation. At a time marked by war, environmental crises, shifting identities, and deep social divisions, the exhibition invites us to reflect on love as an ethical, political, and civic practice.
With its longstanding connections to memory, repair, relationships, and care, fiber art provides a particularly powerful language for exploring these questions, bringing the private and the collective, the body and the community, the sacred and the secular into dialogue.
The 2026 edition also takes on particular significance in the context of the commemorations marking the eight-hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, whose life and thought placed love for creation and for others at the heart of his experience. The dialogue between Francis, Dante, and contemporary thought thus provides one of the key cultural frameworks within which the Biennial unfolds.
The exhibition brings together works by 19 artists from diverse cultural and generational backgrounds: Parimah Avani, Annalisa Bollini, Claudia Casarino, Ise Cellier, Barbara D’Antuono, Daniele Davitti, Mara Di Giammatteo, Ilaria Feoli, Magdalena Fermina, Grazia Gallo, Serena Gamba, Caren Garfen, Andi Kacziba, Silvia Manazza, Karola Pezarro, Michael Sylvan Robinson, Giulia Ronchetti, Yukoh Tsukamoto, and Ann Vollum.
