Valencian traditional dress leaves the festival and enters the museum. The IVAM will open Floración on 15 December, an exhibition for which Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos has created a monumental sculpture especially, inspired by Valencian silks, the ornamentation of the fallera dress and popular devotion to the Virgen de los Desamparados.

The piece is titled 'Valquíria Amparo' and is no minor work in her career: 25 metres long and 4.8 metres high, suspended from 75 anchor points with steel cables, it will occupy the central hall of gallery 1 at the IVAM. There it will unfold organic forms, like tentacles or branches, carrying the festival's ornamental richness into the museum.

The material is part of the point. Vasconcelos turned to the Compañía Valenciana de la Seda to produce the installation's fabrics especially: silks, brocades, lace, passementerie and artisanal jacquards integrated into the sculptural structure. The artist thus connects with an industry that shaped Valencia's economic and cultural history for centuries.

From Versailles to the IVAM

Winner of the Julio González prize, Vasconcelos has turned thread, embroidery and textile work traditionally associated with women into an artistic language present in major international museums. In 2012 she became the first woman and the youngest artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Palace of Versailles, an intervention that drew 1.6 million visitors. Her work has also shown at the Guggenheim Bilbao and returned several times to the Venice Biennale.

Her work reclaims craft knowledge passed down through generations: crochet, embroidery, knitting and passementerie that, in her hands, take on monumental scale. Here, the starting material is the silk that has dressed generations of falleras.

The show opens on 15 December and places Valencia on the international contemporary art circuit with a material of its own at the centre.

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