The Kashmir shawl, yesterday and today

Exhibition of Stefano Cioffi’s photographs from Srinagar, along with ancient and modern Kashmir shawls Stefano Cioffi, photographer, director and musician, presents ten images, like many windows onto the world of the Kashmir shawls artisans, and allows us to discover places and faces of a unique textile art.

Thanks to a fortuitous meeting, a sincere friendship was born between Stefano Cioffi and Jan Meer who welcomed him to India at the beginning of the pandemic, helping him to overcome the crisis and quickly return home, with the promise of taking him to visit his land, Kashmir, one day. Stefano talks about it in the article “The secret history of Kashmir in a game of the loom” which he wrote and illustrated for Lo Specchio della Stampa on 25 June this year returning from the trip to Kashmir where he had the opportunity to enter the houses of weavers and embroiderers, the last masters of an art endangered by pressing modernity.

“Jan Meer and I met by chance, and chance made us become friends. It was a lucky meeting. Becoming friends is always a blessing…Jan opened the doors of Kashmir to me, Jan and Rosenda opened the doors of many houses in Kashmir. The most refined embroiderers in the entire Indian subcontinent work in the houses I entered. A world opened up and I entered this hidden world of contemplation full of emotion.

You enter houses barefoot. Parvaiz, Rashid, Manzoor showed me my way into those rooms, sober and elegant at the same time. I entered the intimacy of families, I saw everyday life from inside their walls. It was a privilege, I felt like one of them.

We sit in the lounge. In the living room there are no chairs, you sit on the floor, one next to the other, on the colored carpets that decorate the floors, resting on many cushions near the walls. There is an atmosphere of open conviviality…At the moment of saying goodbye I realized that something had happened. Our gazes finally met. We are in the garden, and then outside the door. The eyes search for each other. And a greeting full of smiles and welcome, theirs, mine. I’m happy and they’re happy. Me because I entered their lives, they because they let me in. Looking at each other in the eyes and feeling closeness with the other makes you richer.”

Stefano Cioffi

Stefano Cioffi, photographer, director and musician, has been working for years in a transversal and multidisciplinary way leveraging his versatile education and constantly proposing nationally and internationally new successful productions. He has been called several times to exhibit for very prestigious museums, in Italy and abroad, in France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the United States and Japan. He collaborates with the newspapers La Stampa and La Repubblica.

L’OFFICINA Imagination Lab, a home of creativity in Monteleone D’Orvieto, hosts the textile archive of the Parisian maison Le Cachemirien, where among other pieces there is a large collection of Kashmir shawls. A small part of it will be exhibited to show the evolution of the espoliné shawl, called kanikar, obtained by interlocking small bobbins on the loom, one of the slowest and most painstaking weaving techniques.

This panoramic presents shawls with palmettes positioned at the edges of the early 19th century, as well as those with more complex motifs from the last glorious period before the Franco-Prussian war, up to those woven about fifteen years ago following the designs of Rosenda Arcioni Meer, geometric motifs and florals that deviate from tradition, but interpret landscapes and geometries specific to Kashmir, such as the “Shalimar” or “Kathamband” shawl.

Rosenda and Jan Meer who animated the Parisian gallery Le Cachemirien for twenty years and who now look after the association L’OFFICINA Imagination Lab, have at heart to make these textile works known. The Kashmir shawl testifies of the dignity of a people, and this exhibition aspires to ignite a meeting of cultures thanks to the immediate and universal language of these precious works of textile art.