For the first time, Manifattura Tessile DINOLE® takes part in MADE IN, the artist-in-residence program launched by Artissima and supported by the Camera di commercio di Torino, which brings together contemporary creativity and industrial excellence. The initiative, now in its third edition, promotes collaborations between emerging artists and leading companies in the Turin area, exploring how art and manufacturing can intersect to generate new forms of expression.

For its first time joining the MADE IN project, DINOLE® is collaborating with Maria Positano, an Italian visual artist who works between her origin country and London. Known for using sculpture to explore new ideas of identity and transformation, Positano is spending several weeks inside DINOLE®’s historic production site in the Piedmont region, getting to know its processes, people, and materials up close.

The artist’s work starts where the production line ends. The leftover velvet, scraps that would normally be set aside, has become her material of choice. In the factory, she’s experimenting with how to handle these fragments, to bring them into a different context. It’s not just about upcycling and reuse; it’s about asking what these remnants can hold, protect, or reveal, especially when they’re given a new shape, and examined with a different kind of attention.

This residency marks a new chapter in DINOLE®’s journey of combining tradition and innovation. DINOLE® has been making high-quality exclusive, Made in Italy velvets since 1913 and, over the years, its fabrics have found their way into the collections of the most prestigious textile editors, international wholesalers and luxury design brands.

This is the first time the company is working with a contemporary artist, as a way to step outside the usual rhythm of production and look at its materials from a different perspective.

The collaboration with Maria Positano isn’t about changing what the company does, but about opening a space to ask new questions, about process, waste and about how something identified as industrial can also carry a deep, intrinsic meaning.

The artwork developed during the residency will be unveiled at Artissima 2025, Italy’s most prominent contemporary art fair, taking place in Turin from October 31 to November 2, 2025.

Participating in MADE IN is a way for DINOLE® to build on its heritage, with a strong future-oriented vision. An opportunity to connect what the company knows best: textiles, materials and manufacturing know-how, with questions that come from outside its world. A kind of exchange that doesn’t always lead to answers, but that can open up space for something unexpected to start.