Considering the Collection &
The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves An Insert by Ana Torfs

Ana Torfs, Test piece on a Jacquard loom for The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves. In cooperation with TextielLab, Tilburg
© photo: Ana Torfs, 2024

From 3 October 2025, the next edition of our exhibition format Considering the Collection & An Insert by …, entitled The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves, premières a new work by Belgian artist Ana Torfs, consisting of 28 Jacquard tapestries.

During that strange summer 2020, when the whole world was gripped by a virus, Torfs was reading Vergil’s Aeneid. She noted this fragment from the third part: ‘And when, (...), you draw near to the town of Cumae, the haunted lakes, and Avernus with its rustling woods, you will see an inspired prophetess, who deep in a rocky cave sings the Fates and entrusts to leaves signs and symbols. Whatever verses the maid has traced on leaves she arranged in order and stores away in the cave. These remain unmoved in their places and do not quit their rank; but when at the turn of a hinge a light breeze has stirred them, and the open door has scattered the tender foliage, never thereafter does she care to catch them, as they flutter in the rocky cave, nor to recover their places and unite the verses; inquirers depart no wiser than they came, and loathe the Sibyl’s seat.’ (Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. Translated by Fairclough, H R. Loeb Classical Library Volumes 63 & 64. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 1916.) Only enigmatic fragments remain of the prophecies: disjecta membra, scattered leaves.

It was thus certainly not a coincidence that Torfs was thinking of the Sibyl of Cumae when she spent four weeks in October and November 2020 collecting autumn leaves in her home city of Brussels. This was a way of clearing her mind, after her solo show at Bozar in Brussels was closed for the second time by a government lockdown. This repetitive gesture of picking a leaf up from the ground and then laying it between newspaper pages to dry at home gave her life a rhythm during this time. When the leaves had dried several weeks later, Torfs photographed a selection from this herbarium as the basis for 28 textile designs in which these photographs are combined with short textual notes written on scraps of paper. These notes are anaphoric experiments in brevity, and each one begins with “The day that ...” or “The year that ...”

This group of works is related to Sibylline motifs from the Academy’s Paintings Gallery, the Graphic Collection, and other museums, and also seen in the light of historically shifting evaluations of female prophecy in iconographic and mythological tradition.

These works are produced in collaboration with TextielLab, the Tilburg Textile Museum workshop.

Curators: Sabine Folie, Synne Genzmer