29.05.2025 — 27.07.2025

Every Month I Weave takes inspiration from the life of Margherita Datini, wife of the renowned 14th-century Prato textile merchant Francesco Datini. Through a rich body of work that includes soft sculptures and digitally woven jacquard tapestries, Frowijn constructs a political reflection on the invisible and historically undervalued labor of women, and the role it has played within the development of Western economic systems.

Combining archival materials with contemporary imagery, Frowijn constructs a layered narrative that links the overlooked lives of women in history to the conditions of today’s female labor force, especially within Prato’s multicultural textile landscape.

Drawing on the ideas of Italian ecofeminist philosopher Silvia Federici, the exhibition offers a space for political reflection on the body, care, and labor, connecting past and present through traditional and digital textile techniques.

layered narratives

Margherita, long on the margins of the historical narrative, becomes the symbol of all the women who have supported, in silence and without recognition, the material and affective scaffolding of male economic power.
She is the subject of the Outfit of the Night series, four large tapestries made on a digital jacquard loom, intersecting archival documents, textile iconographies and fragments of the medieval and contemporary city of Prato. In this layered narrative, dense with clues about Margherita’s life and woven on the edge of abstraction, Frowijn also incorporates symbols of workers in today's textile supply chains, including those of the Chinese community, which constitutes an often invisible piece of the local economy. Images collected during her residency at Lottozero interpenetrate with the figure of Margherita, a symbolic matrix of a female genealogy that spans the centuries, uniting stories of invisible labor and everyday resistance.
Each tapestry has wefts of a single color: red, green, blue, and black in direct reference to RGB coding, the basis of digital vision, and at the same time to the colors of medieval wools preserved in the Datini archive. The color choice recalls both the origins of Prato's textile trade and contemporary production technologies, in a dialogue that links the city's memory to its current industrial identity.

body as commodity

Every Month I Weave articulates an essentially political discourse on the perception of the female body in Western capitalist society.

In the series Super Sofas - The Fruits of the Loom, the body takes on the guise of both furniture and meat for the slaughter. Upholstery, backrests and armrests model themselves on the volumes of anatomy - breasts, hips, buttocks - transforming the stereotypical forms of femininity into elements of domestic comfort, in a short circuit between eroticism, functional object and exploitation.