MASP

Desconhecida (Artista filipina)

Lenço de cabeça (Seputangan), Século 19

  • Author:
    Desconhecida (Artista filipina)
  • Bio:
  • Title:
    Lenço de cabeça (Seputangan)
  • Date:
    Século 19
  • Medium:
    Fio de seda sobre tecido de algodão
  • Dimensions:
    64 x 65 cm
  • Credit line:
    Compra no contexto da exposição Histórias das mulheres, histórias feministas, 2019-20
  • Object type:
    Tecido
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.10869
  • Photography credits:
    MASP

TEXTS



This headscarf (seputangan) features complex silk embroideries on a cotton canvas made in the nineteenth century by women of the Yakan ethnic group of the Philippines, where this tradition lives on. Usually regarded as works of virtuosic accomplishment and beauty, these textiles and their trade routes also bear a history of colonial violence. The textile trade between Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe took place by way of terrestrial routes over hundreds of years but was interrupted by the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire in the fifteenth century. With the 1453 invasion of Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) by the Ottoman Turks, terrestrial trade between Europe and Asia fell even further into jeopardy. These two episodes were fundamental in the creation of a new route, a maritime one, which opened up an intense global trade of goods— including the trade of souls, as human trafficking was called back then. Textiles are not solely commercial objects; they are also symbolic, affording social and cultural status to those who own them, and demonstrating their owners’ familiarity with a larger world. Textiles and other objects from distant lands also helped confer materiality to the dominion or knowledge of those remote spots. Since the end of the eighteenth century, as these textiles became more accessible to a greater number of people, the iconographic patterns of Eastern textiles decisively influenced Western visual culture, contributing to the creation of a fanciful imagining of “the East” that revealed a distinctly European point of view. This kind of knowledge, and prejudice, called Orientalism, would become even more prevalent in the nineteenth century, as demonstrated in some of the paintings in this exhibition, such as A Greek Captive (1863) by Henriette Browne (1829–1901). This sophisticated operation of cultural appropriation was marked as such even in the beginning of the twentieth century, by the first curator of textiles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Frances Morris (1855–1966). On the occasion of her exhibition of European, Armenian, Indian, Javanese, and Peruvian textiles in 1927, she wrote: “What is particularly valuable in an exhibition with this scope is the opportunity it affords for studying the interrelation of the Oriental model and its European interpretation.”

— Mariana Leme, mestranda em teoria e história da arte, ECA-USP, e integrante da equipe de curadoria, MASP, 2019

Source: Adriano Pedrosa, Isabella Rjeille e Mariana Leme (eds.), Women’s histories, Feminist histories, São Paulo: MASP, 2019.



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