Caterina Pecchioli

We are excited to announce that Caterina Pecchioli received the Thami Mnyele Foundation residency award and will stay in Amsterdam for September.

During the residency she will continue working on and present the visual output and publication of her research project Decolonizing the Gaze: The Colonial Heritage of Italian and International Fashion Design and its Impact on the Collective Imagination, which she developed in 2023 during her previous residency at the Thami Mnyele Foundation, in collaboration with CBK Zuidoost and Framer Framed, and was supported by the Italian Council (11th edition, 2022).

Decolonizing the Gaze is an international, participatory project that brings together artists, stylists, and fashion designers who are Afro-descendant and from countries with a colonial past to critically examine how fashion has historically contributed to the visual construction of colonial ideologies and explores ways to reframe these legacies through material culture and embodied practices.

A key phase of the project was carried out in the Netherlands, in collaboration with the Thami Mnyele Foundation, CBK Zuidoost, and Framer Framed. Here, the activities focused on reassessing colonial-era garments and textiles from non-Eurocentric perspectives. In 2023, during a previous residency at the Thami Mnyele Foundation, Caterina led a participatory workshop in collaboration with CBK Zuidoost. The workshop explored the relationship between textiles and colonial history, revealing how personal narratives tied to fabrics are intertwined with colonial histories and shape collective imaginaries. Participants included Noémi Beyer, Zinzi de Brouwer, Carine Mansan Chowanek, Christine Delhaye, Sharelly Emanuelson, Nathalie Ho Kang You, Linnemore Nefdt, Moustapha Sylla, Siobhan Wall, and Rhoda Woets.

Through this collaborative process, institutions were interrogated for their roles in sustaining colonial aesthetics, while simultaneously opening up spaces for artistic reinterpretation, shared memory, and cultural restitution. This approach highlights the possibility for Dutch and international museums and creative networks to contribute to a polyphonic rewriting of fashion history—centering sustainability, cultural agency, and the political potential of design. In particular, the research focused on dress items, fabrics, and accessories from the Italian and Dutch colonial period that are preserved in the collections of the Ex Museo Coloniale in Rome and Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. By addressing the historical narratives embedded in materials such as buttons, animal skins and textiles, the project opened new epistemic paths for institutions and artists alike, affirming the capacity of fashion to imagine identities and histories beyond Eurocentric frames.

The project was featured in the 100th issue of Africa e Mediterraneo magazine (special issue on Restitution) and discussed in Alessandra Vaccari’s essay Caring for “Difficult Heritage”. Addressing the Canon of Italian Fashion by Decolonising Museum Art Practices (2023) for its innovative contribution to museum critique and fashion as a political tool.

During her time in the residency, she will have a round table discussion at Framer Framed on September 18 and an Open Studio on September 19. More information will follow.

The current stage of the project is realised in collaboration with Africa & Mediterraneo.

Caterina Pecchioli is a multimedia and multi-disciplinary artist, researcher, curator, and art director, whose work explores critical aspects and effects of power on mass behavior and socio-cultural and political dynamics. Her artistic process and creative output are based on a hybrid of traditional and relational aesthetics. She often works via participative process and action-research. 

She studied at the Art Lyceum Leon Battista Alberti of Florence and at the DAMS (Visual Arts, Cinema, Music and Performing Arts Studies) University of Bologna, where she received her master degree with laude in 2005. Her thesis, Antonin Artaud: Signs and Drawings, won the DAMS Prize and become part of the Fonds A. Artaud  at the Biblioth que nationale de France. In 2006 she moved in Amsterdam where in 2009 she graduated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and she was nominated for the Gra Award. In 2007 she took part in the project Performativity of Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Master in Fine Art in Rotterdam.

She is currently part of Nation25 that she co-founded in 2015, an artistic-curatorial collective and participative platform that deals with contemporary socio-political and environmental topics, with a special focus on migration issues, and she is the initiator and art director of the art and fashion project B&W - Black & White, The Migrant Trend that promotes migrant design and fashion production made in Italy through research activities, exhibitions, counseling, best practices, and training.

https://www.caterinapecchioli.com/

https://www.instagram.com/catepecchioli/