The Mantle
Loredana Longo: The Mantle / Wearing My Loss (2002–2025) Debuts at Malta Biennale
Loredana Longo’s intimate mantle—woven from 23 years of her own hair—premiers at the Inquisitor’s Palace during Malta Biennale 2026. This living diary of loss, vulnerability, and resilience transforms personal endurance into archetypal iconography, echoing mercy, power, and protection across art history.
The artwork is a mantle crafted from the artist’s own hair, patiently collected and sewn over 23 years. The years are embroidered inside the cape with golden thread, forming the spinal column of an absent body.
In 2002, Longo began losing significant amounts of hair following medical treatment. She started gathering the strands left in her brush after washing, initially intending to make a wig. Hair had always symbolised her strength; its loss marked a time of vulnerability. Years later, she began sewing the strands onto a velvet cloth—a long cloak to cover her head and body like armour, reclaiming power from what was lost.
She continues collecting her hair and stitching it onto the cloak’s base in a slow, incessant process. The satin-lined interior bears gold-embroidered dates, turning the garment into a diary of loss and a life’s work.
At the Biennale, the mantle’s iconography spans human history—religious, anthropological, mythological, and political—evident in masterpieces from Piero della Francesca’s mercy and welcome, Picasso’s protection, Rubens’s power, Klimt’s sorrow, to Renoir’s elegance.
Gathered and stitched together, it forms a ritual of cleansing and remembering. Spanning decades of illness, pain, and endurance—23 years—this vessel of memory archives an identity in transformation, through vital thresholds and inner passages.
Yet it gestures toward a collective journey: a social evolution demanding authentic remembrance, gathering, and purification without forgetting. Photos courtesy Giorgio Possenti.
The Malta Biennale 2026 takes place from 11 March to 29 May 2026, under the theme CLEAN | CLEAR | CUT, curated by Rosa Martínez. It features 28 national/thematic pavilions across historical sites in Valletta, Vittoriosa, and Gozo.
