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Lot Essay
Created in 1988, the present work is a beautiful and vibrant example of Alighiero Boetti’s most celebrated and beloved series: the Mappe (Maps). These radiant, hand-sewn silk embroideries show the world’s landmasses fragmented into various nation-states, whose flags fill their irregular outlines to create a dazzling melee of colour, pattern and symbol. They were produced in partnership with Afghan weavers—working initially in Afghanistan, and later in exile in Pakistan—who crafted the maps according to Boetti’s instructions. The process created unexpected variations that the artist welcomed, generating new meanings through a collaboration across geographical, cultural and temporal distance. Distinguished by its colourful Farsi script within a bright pink border—a colour-scheme seen in just one other Mappa—the present work also features elegant vertical striations in its sumptuous blue seas, tracing where the artisans changed one spool of thread for another of subtly different hue.
Boetti first went to Kabul in the spring of 1971. Having visited simply out of curiosity—during the 1970s many westerners, including Peter Simon, travelled through Afghanistan as part of the ‘hippy trail’—he fell in love with the country. He felt free there from the fraught political climate of his native Italy, where he had drifted away from the ideas of Arte Povera towards a more mystical, conceptual outlook. He befriended a local waiter, Gholam Dastaghir, who confided in him that he would like to open a hotel. Boetti returned in autumn that year, and together they opened their new establishment, calling it the One Hotel. It swiftly became a creative hub and something of an art project in itself, often frequented by travelling artists and friends of Boetti. Initially in collaboration with the Royal School of Embroidery, and later with local weavers organised by Dastaghir, it was here that the Mappe were conceived.
From 1971 onwards Boetti would travel to Afghanistan twice a year with his family, creating designs on site and supervising progress on the Mappe and other projects. His visit in the autumn of 1979 was his last before the Soviet occupation. Access became increasingly difficult after the invasion in December, and Boetti was forced to assemble his plans for the Mappe in Italy to be shipped over. Many Afghans fled the country during this period, and in the early 1980s Boetti would begin a new phase of production with displaced weavers who had found refuge in Peshawar or Quetta in Pakistan. The Farsi script at the present work’s upper and left-hand borders reads: ‘Needlework by Alighiero Boetti, the Italian artist, which has been prepared and made with the collaboration of Abdoljalil Afghani in the city of Peshawar in Pakistan. It is important to note that this needlework was hand-crafted in the city of Peshawar in Pakistan by unknown Afghan women who were forced to leave behind their villages.’
The Mappe’s borders often included texts in Italian, Farsi or a combination of the two. While Boetti composed the Italian phrases, the Farsi inscriptions were devised by men such as Abdoljalil—whose name appears in a number of works of this period—who supervised the weavers. They often described the time and place of the works’ making and the conditions of Afghan exile after 1979. The border here further records that ‘Alighiero Boetti met Abdoljalil for the first time in the year 88 and asked for his collaboration in the field of the art of needlework.’ Even for Western viewers who could not read the language, the calligraphic Farsi script was a visual signal that the Mappe were the products of labour undertaken at a cultural and geographical remove. The borders give space to the voices of different authors, and highlight the works’ overlapping stages of linguistic, symbolic and material translation. Boetti happily relinquished control over the final product, finding magic in the disjuncts between his conception of an artwork and its ultimate execution.
Boetti’s designs were created with the help of his collaborator Rinaldo Rossi, who periodically visited a London cartographer to purchase the latest maps and flag-books. Rossi would return to Genoa and prepare an acetate which he projected onto canvas. Basic indications of colours were applied before the canvases were sent to Kabul for embroidery. When production shifted to Pakistan, the designs became more thorough—involving silkscreened colour and felt-tipped details in smaller areas—as the work could no longer be so directly supervised. In some cases Boetti let the weavers choose their own colours for the oceans, which might return pink, orange, black or white instead of blue. By 1986 he had begun to travel to Peshawar or send others on his behalf, and the canvases could once again be less precise in their details.
Over the years, Boetti’s designs also reflected changing ways of mapping the globe. Early examples were based on the then-standard Mercator projection, which was seen by the 1980s as ideologically biased. Emphasising areas at higher latitudes, this projection lent visual dominance to the affluent Global North—with Greenland appearing as large as Africa—while also amplifying the perceived threat of the Soviet Union. In later Mappe such as the present work, Boetti instead used the Robinson projection, which features gently curved meridians and gives a greater relative scale to southern continents. Cartography, like any way of picturing the world, is never neutral. Boetti sought to disrupt the map’s structural relations to authority and subjugation, instead creating objects woven through with dialogue, exchange and instability.
Boetti’s Mappe as a whole highlight the artificial nature of the world’s divisions, which alter between embroideries and across the years, recording political machinations and shifting power dynamics. In the present work, the flag of the Soviet Union—replaced in Boetti’s final two Mappe, which were completed in 1993, by those of Russia and the Baltic States—merges with China’s to cloak much of the picture in red. The flaming torch of Zaire’s flag blazes in the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Namibia, which would become independent of South African rule in 1990, is left as a blank white space in recognition of its ongoing civil war. The seal on Afghanistan’s tricolour flag features a red star that had in fact been removed in a new design by 1987. Boetti’s Mappa is a poignant reflection of the global, interwoven instability that still characterises life on earth today. The work also reminds us that there are other ways of seeing, and that, through connection, it is possible to imagine a different and more beautiful world.
Boetti first went to Kabul in the spring of 1971. Having visited simply out of curiosity—during the 1970s many westerners, including Peter Simon, travelled through Afghanistan as part of the ‘hippy trail’—he fell in love with the country. He felt free there from the fraught political climate of his native Italy, where he had drifted away from the ideas of Arte Povera towards a more mystical, conceptual outlook. He befriended a local waiter, Gholam Dastaghir, who confided in him that he would like to open a hotel. Boetti returned in autumn that year, and together they opened their new establishment, calling it the One Hotel. It swiftly became a creative hub and something of an art project in itself, often frequented by travelling artists and friends of Boetti. Initially in collaboration with the Royal School of Embroidery, and later with local weavers organised by Dastaghir, it was here that the Mappe were conceived.
From 1971 onwards Boetti would travel to Afghanistan twice a year with his family, creating designs on site and supervising progress on the Mappe and other projects. His visit in the autumn of 1979 was his last before the Soviet occupation. Access became increasingly difficult after the invasion in December, and Boetti was forced to assemble his plans for the Mappe in Italy to be shipped over. Many Afghans fled the country during this period, and in the early 1980s Boetti would begin a new phase of production with displaced weavers who had found refuge in Peshawar or Quetta in Pakistan. The Farsi script at the present work’s upper and left-hand borders reads: ‘Needlework by Alighiero Boetti, the Italian artist, which has been prepared and made with the collaboration of Abdoljalil Afghani in the city of Peshawar in Pakistan. It is important to note that this needlework was hand-crafted in the city of Peshawar in Pakistan by unknown Afghan women who were forced to leave behind their villages.’
The Mappe’s borders often included texts in Italian, Farsi or a combination of the two. While Boetti composed the Italian phrases, the Farsi inscriptions were devised by men such as Abdoljalil—whose name appears in a number of works of this period—who supervised the weavers. They often described the time and place of the works’ making and the conditions of Afghan exile after 1979. The border here further records that ‘Alighiero Boetti met Abdoljalil for the first time in the year 88 and asked for his collaboration in the field of the art of needlework.’ Even for Western viewers who could not read the language, the calligraphic Farsi script was a visual signal that the Mappe were the products of labour undertaken at a cultural and geographical remove. The borders give space to the voices of different authors, and highlight the works’ overlapping stages of linguistic, symbolic and material translation. Boetti happily relinquished control over the final product, finding magic in the disjuncts between his conception of an artwork and its ultimate execution.
Boetti’s designs were created with the help of his collaborator Rinaldo Rossi, who periodically visited a London cartographer to purchase the latest maps and flag-books. Rossi would return to Genoa and prepare an acetate which he projected onto canvas. Basic indications of colours were applied before the canvases were sent to Kabul for embroidery. When production shifted to Pakistan, the designs became more thorough—involving silkscreened colour and felt-tipped details in smaller areas—as the work could no longer be so directly supervised. In some cases Boetti let the weavers choose their own colours for the oceans, which might return pink, orange, black or white instead of blue. By 1986 he had begun to travel to Peshawar or send others on his behalf, and the canvases could once again be less precise in their details.
Over the years, Boetti’s designs also reflected changing ways of mapping the globe. Early examples were based on the then-standard Mercator projection, which was seen by the 1980s as ideologically biased. Emphasising areas at higher latitudes, this projection lent visual dominance to the affluent Global North—with Greenland appearing as large as Africa—while also amplifying the perceived threat of the Soviet Union. In later Mappe such as the present work, Boetti instead used the Robinson projection, which features gently curved meridians and gives a greater relative scale to southern continents. Cartography, like any way of picturing the world, is never neutral. Boetti sought to disrupt the map’s structural relations to authority and subjugation, instead creating objects woven through with dialogue, exchange and instability.
Boetti’s Mappe as a whole highlight the artificial nature of the world’s divisions, which alter between embroideries and across the years, recording political machinations and shifting power dynamics. In the present work, the flag of the Soviet Union—replaced in Boetti’s final two Mappe, which were completed in 1993, by those of Russia and the Baltic States—merges with China’s to cloak much of the picture in red. The flaming torch of Zaire’s flag blazes in the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Namibia, which would become independent of South African rule in 1990, is left as a blank white space in recognition of its ongoing civil war. The seal on Afghanistan’s tricolour flag features a red star that had in fact been removed in a new design by 1987. Boetti’s Mappa is a poignant reflection of the global, interwoven instability that still characterises life on earth today. The work also reminds us that there are other ways of seeing, and that, through connection, it is possible to imagine a different and more beautiful world.