In Pia Ferm’s tapestry cappriccio for the Swedish Embassy in Beijing, the beauty of ruin and the hope of construction meet. It is a story about the passage of time, about the traces of man in the landscape and about the slow, silent reclaiming of nature.
cappriccio is a textile artwork in tufted wool. Here, a landscape unfolds as if it were in a dream – a place where ruin meets construction site, where something has just been demolished and something else is taking shape. It is a landscape in transformation, in motion, in the middle of stillness. Like a double exposure of time: both what is disappearing and what is emerging are here, simultaneously, in the same breath.
The starting point is fragments. Memories and photographs from urban and semi-urban environments. Construction sites, demolition sites, industrial areas, archaeological excavations, quarries and gravel pits. Places that are often considered transitional zones, where order is dissolving and something new has not yet found its form. They are dusty, sun-warmed, seemingly lifeless, but contain their own rhythm, a visual language of shards and lines, of glittering dust and temporary constructions.
In the hands of Ferm, these fragments are joined together to form a new landscape in an inner montage rather than a realistic rendering. Through the density and surface of the tufted wool, she creates a space where time and matter merge. The soft fibres capture the light in the same way that stone reflects the sun, creating a strange duality: something heavy becomes light, something hard becomes soft.
cappriccio is a word meaning whim or fantasy image, and the work carries precisely that dreamlike quality. It is not a place that exists, but one that is felt – an inner terrain shaped by memories, observations and sensations.
In this tapestry, the beauty of the ruin and the hope of construction meet. It is a story about the passage of time, about the traces of man in the landscape and about the slow, silent reclaiming of nature. A state between loss and expectation, between breakup and beginning. Where everything, for a moment, exists simultaneously.
The starting point for the work cappriccio was a large-scale technical and thematic study that Pia Ferm carried out in connection with the group exhibition This is Us at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2023.