Noloom is an upcycling and art design project that transforms unused materials from the Italian textile supply chain into precious one-of-a-kind pieces.
Silk, linen, wool, cotton. These are some of the precious natural fibres from the Italian textile supply chain that take centre stage in fiber art pieces created without the use of a loom. It is the idea of Caterina Fumagalli and Adriana Fortunato who, through the Noloom project, recover unused fabrics and other materials — such as colour tests, offcuts and selvedges — and, through an upcycling process, transform them into art design works or home couture products. Turning them, as Fumagalli explains, "from materials with no longer a clear destiny into works, archaic installations, capable of engaging in dialogue with a contemporary environment."
Noloom is the latest project by Fibra research, a free textile design journey born in 2019 from the meeting of Fortunato and Fumagalli, architects belonging to different generations and cultures. "Caterina is a Millennial, the generation of adaptation par excellence, open to technological change, whereas I belong to the so-called Boomer generation, which favours a face-to-face approach and which truly had to change its habits after the pandemic," Fortunato recounts.
"The health emergency forced us to organise our work as a creative duo: together we worked out how to devise our own way of communicating, where technology helps us tell part of the creative process and the richness of our intercultural exchange. I too am half Italian, but I reflect all the multiethnic influences connected to Brazil; in Caterina, on the other hand, the beauty of the culture and the storytelling of the traditions linked to made in Italy is clear."
Noloom was born during the very first lockdown brought about by the pandemic in Italy. The actual production process was preceded by months of study, focused above all on textile art and the architecture of the Bauhaus movement, which unites art and design.
All the works are built by four hands without the use of any loom, following two approaches: one centred on linen, called Freefiber, and the other on the use of selvedges, called Cimussa. The founders' aim is to give free rein to female creativity and render women's manual work as an element of memory of the textile tradition.