Mappa
Alighiero Boetti
ALIGHIERO BOETTI, 1991. EMBROIDERY ON COTTON
Boetti’s conceptual tapestries were woven by the same Afghan weavers he had maintained a relationship with since the early 70s. The Mappa series was his crowning achievement, a work in which Boetti ‘did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them. In short, I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges, everything else requires no choosing.’ The one element not already dictated was the color of the ocean, and for this Boetti allowed the Afghan weavers, living in a landlocked country, to choose this, with wonderfully varied results. Boetti’s works are profoundly simple and yet speak to a bigger idea, of a unified world of color and beauty.