World book and copyright day – April 23, 2025

Establishedby UNESCO in 1995, World Book and Copyright Day celebrates reading, creativity, and the role of writing in the construction of individual andcollective memory. In all cultures, the written word — and by extension, books — serves variously as an outline, a device, an archive, a hypertext, a world ofwords and worlds that bridges eras and realms of knowledge. It is a visual and material experience that goes beyond mere reading, embodied in the relationship between text and body, memory and matter,form and function. However, books, with their tropes and imageries, today face new challenges from digital culture, artificial intelligence, and this monumental era of data, which questions the relationship between text and matter, between narrative, memory, and transformation. Thus, books have becomean experimental platform for forms and meanings, a laboratory of design made up of physical and artistic experiences.

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Through its multidisciplinary and cross-media dialogues, i-Mesh has experimented with the myriad inspirations and interpretations surrounding books with varioustypes of special representational collaborations  — from its work with Cristiano Toraldo di Francia on the Librabito project to its collaboration with the Salida Basica Collective. These projects present books in a new dimension, blending design, art, and textile culture. In Librabito,fabric becomes a narrative support made of functional artwork, with the written word becoming a material that can be worn and experienced, through the use of Tyvek and i-Mesh. It is a visual and tactile manifesto, where writing becomes a visual symbol and textile structure. In Salida Basica's studies, reuse serves as a visual memory that reinterprets waste materials as the pages of an unwritten story. Salida Basica’s installations transform materials into a new narrative, offering a perspective for every fragment that, in its metamorphosis, retains the identity of its original story.

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Thus, i-Mesh, in the dialogue between reuse and new creation, acts as a support and driver for creative recycling, the recovery of visual memory, and the reconfiguration of written identity. Both experiences reflect on recovery as an opportunity, never a constraint: a chance to sift through layered meanings and find new connections as passages are reread. For in the end, books — which can become fabric, garments, installations, or outlines — are living matter whose future is not confined to mere paper. The permanence in i-Mesh projects demonstrates and suggests new forms of relationship between word and narrative, space, body, and representation. After all, fashion — the most sensitive and vibrant of ecosystems — teaches us to sense desires and intercept meanings that communities assign to things, places, and the idea of the body. It also teaches us to experiment with symbols, materials, and forms to develop those latent opportunities that transform visions into objects, and occasionally icons.