A Forlì la Fiber Art tra arte e industria: la mostra della Fondazione Dino Zoli
Tessere d'Arte in Forlì: Fiber Art and enterprise in the Dino Zoli Foundation exhibition
From April 29 to July 31, 2026 at the Dino Zoli Foundation in Forli, an exhibition on Fiber Art recounts nine years of dialogue between art and business. Residencies, collective projects and textile experiments show the role of fabric as a contemporary language between artistic research and industrial production.
By Redazione | 27/04/2026 15:23
The Dino Zoli Foundation in Forlì presents the exhibition Tessere d'Arte. Interweaving Matter and Creation, curated by Nadia Stefanel, scheduled from April 29 to July 31, 2026. The exhibition focuses on Fiber Art as a field of research in which textiles take on the function of expressive language and device for contemporary experimentation, within a structured dialogue between enterprise and artistic practice. The project stems from the experience of Dino Zoli Textile, a company active since 1972 and a well-established reality in the Made in Italy panorama, which in the last nine years has developed an ongoing path of collaboration with artists and creatives. Since 2017, materials, technologies and production skills have been made available to shared research processes, generating a constant confrontation between textile design and industrial production.
The exhibition returns the results of this journey through three main areas that have characterized the activity between art and business: art residencies, group exhibitions and special projects. These are three lines of work that highlight different modes of interaction between artists, company and territory, in which the fabric becomes an operational, narrative and relational tool.
The art residencies constitute the most direct core of confrontation between industrial practice and contemporary languages. The artists involved worked in close contact with materials, production processes and company personnel, transforming fabric into an active element of narrative. In this context is Elena Bellantoni 's 2022 residency, which involved the involvement of employees in participatory workshops and the creation of linen and velvet costumes produced by Dino Zoli Textile. The project flowed into the video workSe ci fosse luce sarebbe bellissimo, in which the relational and productive dimension is intertwined with the performative and visual one.
The second area is represented by the group exhibitions that have followed one another over the years, developing a curatorial discourse centered on the experimentation of textile materials and their possible transformations in an installation key. Among the projects is Utopian Seductions. From New Materials to Recycled Art. From Piero Manzoni to New Generations, realized between 2023 and 2024, which included Francesca Pasquali's installation Plot. The project highlighted how even materials derived from production waste can become the basis for new forms of artistic research.
This was followed by the exhibition Exploratory Plots of 2024-2025, which focused on the ability of fabric to generate sensory environments and experiential pathways, in which the material becomes an integral part of the construction of the exhibition space. A further project is IS HERE, created together with students from the Architectural Decoration Course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. The students designed textile patterns later developed and printed by Dino Zoli Textile for a series of seats. The project was born from the collection of words, images and sounds from the young people of the social cooperatives La Fraternità and Arca di Noè, building a shared narrative related to identity and memory. The phrase "It is HERE," printed on one of the seats made with salvaged structures, becomes a symbolic element of the relationship between the different experiences involved.
The third area concerns special projects, which include artistic interventions related to specific themes or contexts of particular social and environmental relevance. These include Silvia Camporesi's Fragile Sublime, composed of twelve photographs dedicated to the memory of the Romagna flood of 2023 and focused on the "Franco Agosto" Urban Park. The images, taken on the same day, render a place suspended between real dimension and dreamlike perception, characterized by silence and stillness. The photographs were printed on fabric, a choice that introduced a material component to the photographic image. The selected textile support, characterized by an iridescent white, helped to enhance the dominant colors of the works, particularly the shades of green and brown.
In the same sphere is the Camille project by Silvia Bigi, developed through collaboration with the company team and the use of digital sublimation printing, an evolution of the transfer technique. The production process enabled the creation of textile surfaces characterized by repeated graphic patterns, in which vegetable elements and phrases related to the Inquisition trials are interwoven, also reworked through artificial intelligence tools. The work consists of six large cloths that construct a complex visual narrative, in which the decorative surface becomes a space for reflection on historical stratifications and female identities. Alongside the strictly artistic dimension, the exhibition also includes a reference to Dino Zoli Textile's commitment to the reuse of materials not used in production processes and social activities supporting communities, schools and territorial realities. This aspect is part of a framework of responsibility and collaboration with the local context.
Practical information
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