Connextions 2025: Woven by Bau & Cos

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As part of the Connextions 2025 project, see Bau & Cos Studio's vinyl artworks, Woven (Owl and Raccoon), on display inside the foyer of the Oakville Centre for Performing Arts.

Bau & Cos offer the following description of their work:

The act of weaving is deep-rooted in human consciousness; it is as ancient as storytelling. Weaving can be seen in all foremost civilizations and in some, it developed into an art form to express culture, depict important events while uniquely identifying their own visual language. While weaving has been applied to various artistic forms, we are specifically interested in the ćilim rug approach for due to its transcultural inherited connectivity, rich colour, and contextual visual adaptability to storytelling. “Ćilim” in Serbian, borrowed from “kilim” in Turkish, taken from “gelim” in Persian, which directly translate to “spread” in English is a type of flat tapestry woven rug that traditionally exist throughout Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Croatia.

Customarily, feelings of happiness, fear, and sorrow were expressed in the weaving motifs in naturally dyed colour palettes, such as an evil eye, a cross, a ram’s horn, a hairbrush, fertility, and love in burgundy, blue, orange, red, and black colours. By creating our own lexicon of ćilim rugs inspired by the local wildlife, our “Owl” and “Raccoon” illustrations aim to visually weave various stylistic patterns to bring the old-world experience of embroidery and storytelling into a modern digital artform. To us, Woven is a cross-cultural experience artwork that reimagines our native wildlife via a playful and colourful ćilim inspired language that will invite and intrigue a sense of wonder to its viewers.

About the artists:

Bau and Cos Studio are a Greater Toronto Area-based Art, Architecture and Design firm founded by Andres Ulises Bautista and Novka Cosovic. As a team of two with different backgrounds and from different parts of the world - Nicaragua and Serbia - they lean on their extensive travels and diverse cultural experience to create contextual public artworks. As artists, their goal is to engage the public in a manner that is meaningful and respectful while constructing a sense of wonder.

Organizer

Town of Oakville

The Town of Oakville is located on Treaty 14 and 22 lands, the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and the Haudenosaunee. Oakville is home to many different First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. A vibrant and impressive community within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the Town of Oakville is a beautiful lakeside town with a strong heritage, preserved and celebrated by residents and visitors alike. Since the 1800s, it has become one of the most coveted areas to live and work in Ontario, with 225,000 residents calling Oakville home. The town offers all the advantages of a well-serviced urban centre with first-rate facilities and amenities while maintaining its small-town feel.