Indira Allegra, TEXERE: The Shape of Loss is A Tapestry, 2022, Commemorative images and text offered from users of TEXERE, LED Tiles, Dimensions variable
Click the button below for the audio and text of the VISUAL DESCRIPTION for Indira Allegra’s TEXERE: The Shape of Loss is A Tapestry:
Indira Allegra (b.1980) (they/them) is a conceptual artist and recognized leader in the field of performative craft. Allegra’s performances and installations explore the transformative poetics of death, memorial, and regeneration.
How can we begin to mourn the many, many losses of the pandemic? How do we counter the ways in which pandemic has created a culture of disposability? For Chapter 8 of Indisposable: Structures of Support after the ADA, Allegra addressed these questions by creating a global, web-based platform entitled TEXERE. Loss is a normal part of the human experience. Yet so often losses go unrecognized, or we are urged to forget them, get over them, and move on quickly. Indeed, we need more rituals and objects to acknowledge our losses. TEXERE transforms human losses into a new kind of memorial object, an ever-evolving digital tapestry created with submissions authored by people using the site. The creation of the digital tapestry exists as both a new kind of memorial object and visual evidence of the need for mutuality and interdependence as the basis of care work that is shared between people. Every TEXERE participant becomes an artist in collaboration with other artists worldwide in a new practice of memorial making.
The installation Allegra has created for Indisposable, TEXERE: The Shape of Loss is a Tapestry, invites you to share something you are grieving. The monitors in the gallery will display the constantly evolving digital tapestry created in real time that interweaves your loss with those entered by others. In creating a visible, accessible point of intersection, Allegra deploys the centuries-old art of weaving in the digital space to remind us that the shape of loss – our intertwined stories of it – is a tapestry. TEXERE: The Shape of Loss is a Tapestry moves mourning from the solitary to the collective and intertwined; in so doing, it creates what Allegra terms “global grief equity.”
For Chapter 8, Allegra gave a talk about Texere, followed by a conversation with Therese Noël Allen (a therapist specializing in trauma-informed psychodynamic and somatic therapy), and curators Jessica A. Cooley and Ann M. Fox.
Instagram: @indiraallegra