NATSUKO UCHINO Weaving Lines Stepping on Folds

Threads connect what distance separates in “Weaving Lines Stepping on Folds”, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Japanese artist Natsuko Uchino, presented as the fifth edition of CORTEMPORANEA at Palazzo Chigi Zondadari in Siena. Working across weaving, embroidery, basketry and sound, Uchino builds an immersive body of site-specific works conceived in close collaboration with local artisans from the Sienese region, a methodology that is itself part of the work’s meaning. The result is an exhibition that moves like fabric: layered, porous, alive with the weight of what has been handed down.
At its core lies a reflection on how landscape is carried in the body, mapped not through abstraction but through gesture, material and oral transmission. In the central courtyard, the eponymous installation Weaving Lines Stepping on Folds (2026), assembled on site by woodworker and basketmaker Fabio Guerrini, holds together two seemingly distant traditions: Sienese artisanal craft and the navigational stick charts of the Marshall Islands, instruments built to read ocean currents and sailing routes. The parallel is precise and generous both traditions encode space through touch, both survive only by being passed on.
Inside the ballroom, the exhibition deepens into a choreography of presences. Phonocène (flûtes) (2026), conceived with sound designer Fabien Bourdier and ceramicist Olivier Chouteau, fills the space with ceramic tubes activated by modulating air, drawing on the sonic traditions of the Asian mouth organ and the polyrhythmic songs of the Pygmies. Nearby, Tanin Toison (2026) and In Utero (2025), obtained through natural dyeing, hang alongside Net Stick and Stone (2026), a network of knots woven on site that frays toward the ground, and the Textile Écru-Beige (2026) series, embroidered collectively by women of the local association “Crea&Dimostra”. In the yellow bedroom, a third textile from the same series is suspended before the window like a calligraphic scroll – at once domestic object, ritual cloth and collective memory.