Per filo e per segno (By Thread and By Sign)

The title of Alighiero Boetti’s Per filo e per segno translates literally as ‘By thread and by sign’: this is an Italian idiom meaning ‘neatly’ or ‘with precision’, born of painters and carpenters using a taut thread covered in powdered chalk to mark up straight lines to follow with brush or saw. It also puns on the execution of Per filo e per segno itself, which consists of signs literally woven from thread – a 4 x 4 square of letters in scintillating rainbow hues spells out the titular phrase when read from top to bottom, column by column. Boetti’s Arazzi (tapestries) came to embody his belief that the unity of the world comprised of a harmony of opposites based on the coexistence of order and disorder. Within the geometric square, words are fragmented into letters, creating a composite of organised chaos. At first glance, these letters can be appreciated not for their semantic meaning within a word, but instead as autonomous shapes and forms. By splitting the text into its constituent parts, Boetti exposes language as a sophisticated but ultimately artificial and
systematic arrangement of form. He commissioned groups of Afghan women to weave his tapestries, introducing a collaborative element that furthered his ideas of unity coming from plurality. Boetti credits the idea for this particular work to another young collaborator: the tapestry is complete with a dedication from the artist to ‘Ludovico, son of Giovanni Batista, who rediscovered the sentence below. In Peshawar, Pakistan. [By] Afghan People / January 1993 / with your father in Peshawar / Alighiero Boetti’.