“Trayma” is the Greek word for wound: rupture, laceration, interruption of continuity. This notion of vulnerability lies at the heart of Caterina Roppo’s practice: trauma not as an event, but as a lingering echo that suspends time and repositions identity. Her research does not seek a solution, but a reconciliation with memory, place, and self.
The soul is epidermis: it can be pierced, torn, scarred. Viscose and rayon (vegetal silk), retractable fibers, regenerated cotton, linen, hemp: tactile landscapes where Jacquard and flotté (threads left free) bring together mastery and intentional imperfection. These filaments—scars and threads of thought—unravel, persist, and refuse invisibility. Watercolor migrates into the fiber over months; heat, both medium and metaphor, triggers controlled metamorphoses. The surface opens, the plane rises: textile becomes sculpture.
Apulian origins are both cultural and sensorial matrix. Stone, ruin, flaking plaster, eroded coastlines: not backdrop, but genius loci. Stone, from dolmens and menhirs to collective memory, embodies permanence and emotional resilience; fiber, vulnerability and care. Together, they construct a grammar of trauma. As Michele Spinelli, the artist’s curator, has written, the drawings are not casual but faithful transcriptions of places: signs, lights, and volumes of a shared archive. Here, the question becomes inevitable (Wolfram Eilenberger): Can stone suffer? The answer is material: the wound becomes language.
Roppo’s practice extends into the public sphere: Il Vuoto di Trayma (a traveling program for the prevention of violence) and SEVA (a cultural diplomacy initiative supported by the European Union and the Cultural Relations Platform, in collaboration with University of the Arts London, the Goethe-Institut, the British Council, and with the support of the Italian Embassy in Colombo) work with communities marked by trauma and disaster. The first chapter, in Sri Lanka, re-elaborates trauma through the ancient technique of batik; an initial documentary cut was presented in July 2025.
Roppo rejects intellectual, social, and economic hierarchies, adopting a horizontal, non-paternalistic language.
In sum: Trayma is an Aesthetics of Healing. It does not deny the wound: it gives it space to breathe, to transform, and, in time, to recompose a humanity that is sociologically human.
Photo Credit @when.joy.wanders