Archipelago (Silk route South China Sea - Bay of Bengal)
Date:
2018
Materials:
Textiles sourced from South East Asia, China, Japan, glass beads, silk and embroidery on linen
Dimensions:
150 x 150 cm
Exhibition history:
2026 Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany; 2025 5th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art. Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou, China; 2018 Le Consulat, Paris, France
Courtesy:
Lucy + Jorge Orta. Thanks to NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore
Java batik represents complex spatial concepts relating to community lived experience. Motifs once depicted villages, burial sites, and agricultural cycles. As indonesia has approximately seventeen-thousand islands, batik could have been used for sea navigation.
Drawing from the cultural significance of batik maps, Lucy Orta’s ‘Archipelago’ take the form of immense maritime maps indicating the principal islands and countries of Southeast Asia. Large linen canvases are machine embroidered with nautical lines and compass roses taken from early 17th-century Dutch and British maritime maps depicting the Silk Route from the South China Sea through Bay of Bengal.
Lucy’s textile maps speak to the broader cultural and ecological impact of the transcontinental network of economic and political interests that governed relationships between Asia and Europe, especially the trade of Chinese silk for Venetian glass beads. Today, the China Belt and Road Initiative extends the ever-expansive power of global trade and the consequences, such as the deforestation of Southeast Asian tropical forests for monocrop plantations.
‘Archipelago’ are crafted with textiles representive of the multi-ethnic communities living in Southeast Asia; Java batik and prints, Chinese jacquard, Japanese weaves, and Malay embroideries. Fabrics are patchworked and padded with bias binding to simulate imaginary topographies and populated with beaded silk flowers that make a silent and poetic plea to curb environmental devastation.