Based on the act of embroidery, Chiachio & Giannone’s Domestic Genius exhibition – the first solo exhibition by the Argentinian couple in Chile – re-imagines the intimacy of the home as a force in perpetual expansion. The duo formed by Leo Chiachio and Daniel Giannone has been working with textiles since 2003, constantly looking into intimate spaces, dissident family imaginaries and queer affections. Throughout the years, these artists have done several self-portraits in distant cultures, spaces and times, together with their dog Piolín. Evoking Henri Rousseau’s landscapes and colours, and the textile work of the gay artist Feliciano Centurión, among others, Chiachio & Giannone transform the embroidery technique with their baroque queer sensitivity.
Embroidering is rehearsing a common language, a domestic language that here is reconsidered as a space that can also be masculine. And because embroidering is, for Chiachio & Giannone, delineating a brotherhood, an artistic sorority, a genealogical tree that, nourished by the senses of shared life, acquires the form of a weave rather than a tree. A weave where, following Haraway, ‘it is impossible to distinguish with certainty above from below, and everything seems to grow sideways’, a weft in which the multidirectional flow of bodies, materials and everyday affections reveals the ever moving image of aesthetic, vital and affective networks.
Cynthia Francica, curator.
