“The most beautiful butterfly I have ever pinned down suddenly bursts through the glass and dances mockingly upwards into the blue air…”

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, Philippe-Alain Michaud, 2004

The Traveling Tales: Spinning Between Intervals, Weaving Light explores the emotional and political layers of textile—both as a material and as a metaphor. The project is rooted in archival research into Soviet-era fabric patterns from the Tbilisi Silk Weaving Factory and responds to the ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as to personal memories of growing up in post-Soviet Georgia. Through a series of translucent, imagined camouflage patterns, the work reflects on visibility, vulnerability, and the changing meaning of protection. I view textile patterns as fragmentary archives—visual traces that move between historical events and personal stories. Textile, both as substance and sign, becomes a fabric of memory: a net that holds together emotion, trauma, and the fragile structures of society.

The work in the main vitrine is inspired by Aby Warburg (1866–1929), an influential art historian and cultural theorist. While in a psychiatric hospital, Warburg described speaking to butterflies and moths, calling them his Seelentierchen, his “little soul animals.” For him, these fragile creatures symbolized life, memory, and the passage of time. The image of silk butterflies from the State Silk Museum archive—delicate yet enduring—represents the transmission of emotional experience across generations and forms a link between the archival records and the living world, between the silkworm’s life cycle and the history of silk production. Just as Warburg’s butterflies seemed to come alive with symbolic meaning, the textile fragments in my installations aim to animate and reconnect with hidden or forgotten layers of the past.

My intention was not to impose specific readings of that period, but rather to juxtapose the textile patterns from the past with my current creations that use textile patterns as a medium to reflect on the fragile and unstable nature of Georgia’s current political situation, while also revealing my vulnerability.

The extended version of this work was first exhibited at the Europalia Art Festival 2023, in partnership with Les Drapiers Gallery in Liège, and in collaboration with the State Silk Museum.