I almost forgot, 2025
I almost forgot started from a broken plate and an impulse: to protect each fragment with wool.
From there, Matilde Gazeau Frade extended this care to the objects that reached her and that she has been gathering and salvaging over time.
By wrapping them in wool, by softening sharp edges, by repeating the gestures of felting, by preserving the fragility, and through the act of remembering and of (almost) not forgetting, Matilde reimagines and revisits inherited stories, ways of doing and of taking care.
Exhibition at BLADR, Copenhagen (DK), in July 2025.
Supported by Statens Kunstfond, Københavns Kommune Rådet for visuel kunst, Bureau International de Jeunesse Belgium.
Isabel sent me the pieces
of a broken porcelain plate
that belonged to her mother
Tine was felting stones
and hiding words under the wool
Ana was sewing a goblet with her own hair
I missed my mother
and my mother smells like wool
as I do too now says Manuel
Rabbits were following me everywhere
The battery of the camera my grandfather
gave me years ago was running low
and so was he
I needed to think
I needed to do
We were discussing parting ways
and I couldn't write anymore
All the needles broke
and the moths began eating the wool
While I was repeating the movement
wrapping these objects with my hands
I remembered this story
that my grandfather told me
about a bombshell piece
that tangled itself in his woolen blanket
eighty-one years ago.
*
I almost forgot is a collection of objects I have gathered and salvaged over time – some of the fragments were offered to me but most of them were discarded, forgotten, often found on the street and I chose to preserve by felting wool around each of them. In these abandoned objects, I see the fragility of connections, of the materials, of stories and of memory itself. They carry traces of lives that I do not know. And somehow these objects reached me, and I kept them because they resonated.
Felting is a slow, repetitive craft. While you may occasionally jump when the needle pricks your finger, it is mostly a meditative process. As hands work, memories resurface. Suspended conversations re-emerge. Stories reappear.
One of the stories was one my grandfather told me years ago. He has an elegant wooden cabinet filled with mysterious drawers, and in one of them he had a bombshell fragment. It was heavy and cold when he put it on my hand. He has kept it since the day it flew through the window of his childhood bedroom in France, during the bombings of the Second World War. By a stroke of luck, it got tangled up and decelerated in the wool blanket over his bed. I almost forgot is an attempt to soften sharp edges, to remember by doing, to preserve fragilities, to attest the fractures. This personal constellation is an ode to the relationships, to the bonds and stories that reached me, that I inherited and chose to extend this care to.