Re: <nettime> Can an Old Textile Save Us? How Sustainability Happens How it Happens

[Keith Sanborn via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Beautiful. 

> On Aug 16, 2026, at 2:23 AM, Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
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> One question that might be asked of an AI-GPT, should one be inclined to use those (I am not), is "Can an old textile save us?" that is, might a woven object loomed in a bygone century resolve the supercrisis now threatening humanity and its biosphere on earth.
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> Just such a woven object has recently appeared on exhibit in Minneapolis Minnesota, a tapestry from 1550 by Salviati in Florence made for the Medici.  Could its exhibition, and what humanity learns from viewing of it, be the removal of a straw that prevents the camel's back of hope for world peace, democratic governance, and biodiversity from breaking, and averts the planet's descent into the abyss by restoring checks and balances to US autocracy in the midterms?
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> It all depends upon how we read the tapestry, and what happens after we read it.  But it's possible.
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> What's on this woven fabric?  It's considered one of the most important Renaissance artifacts in the USA, and is certainly the largest in height and width.  The topic is poetry -- writing, literature, the life of words and images -- and it depicts the lion-leopard-wolf scene with which Dante opens his famous poem Inferno.  
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> Dante, still stuck in the dark forest of despair caused by all the shit he has seen (and done) in life, truly on the verge, gets a lucky glimpse through his misery of the hill called Purgatory, that happy path upward celebrated by Joyce, Beckett, and others in which people (humans) get their worst habits out of the way so they can reach the sustainable life of "a people just and sane."  But a lion, and a leopard, then finally a starving wolf block his path.  The wolf is incontinence, greed, overconsumption, and the most terrifying to him of all three.
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> Yet thank goodness he saw poetry, writing, if not on his shelf up the mountainside offering to help him take the long cut and skirt the deadly forces of violence, lies, and addiction.  Dante's in great pain, but found hope, at this moment.  Hope!  Just imagine.
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> Given that Dante died in 1321, why did the Medici care about his poem in 1550 enough to weave (weaving was the source of all of Florence's money) such a miraculous object, this very internet of things, to show that poetry could lead us out of the mire?
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> Well that was Florence's value proposition -- they had launched modern literature (literature written in a living language not Latin) -- and therefore deserved just that little bit more than say Rome or Milano to lead the amazing Renaissance period of modernization.  It was economic yes, and maybe a little religious, this gesture, but mostly it was about press freedom.  Sure the Florence of 1300 banished Dante cruelly, but he was still a Florentine and his achievement at least could be brought back home with honor 250 years later.  
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> Dante perhaps not coincidentally recommended experience, with "extraordinary overtones" according to top Yale expert G. Mazzotta, in the Paradiso 1 & 2.  
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> Maybe our own plummet today into ethnonationalist kleptocracy and its attendant destruction, misery, and decline could be reversed serendipitously by reminding ourselves how poetry helped a different society a long time ago or even just a person.  It's certainly possible, and would be just one of many cases when something bloomed a little bit to interrupt the continuum of history and allow for a swerve, and what's more, a swerve that rescues something good and averts something disastrous.  Tapestries, like paintings and poems, can sometimes do that and this one could too.  (Macfarlane writes at depth about Dante's rivers in his excellent new river book from last year, "Is a River Alive.")  
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> Of course the humans viewing the tapestry will have to interpret the forest as AI-GPT deathmesh-by-despair, and the path up Purgatory Hill as a learning process of lived expression which takes toil but can by definition be done, and the imagined (imagined imagined) realm of sustainable decency as something that must now happen in something more than imaginary terms.  
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> But these are all possible, and in fact, have already happened.
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> At least once.
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> https://new.artsmia.org/exhibition/back-from-the-underworld-mias-dante-tapestry-restored
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