open seam

Yohanna M Roa. curatorial project – 2018
collective exhibition – Cultural Center of Cali

The use of textile is almost as millenary as that of human representation with pigment on walls, the art forms that use textile have also existed for millennia, pre-colonized societies in America had enough production, which operated under the social structure that granted to said textile objects. However, the art world did not always hold it in high esteem because it associated textile art with domesticity and femininity, that is, with the decorative, handmade and manual work “women’s work” that therefore did not imply the production of knowledge, for this reason, it was considered inferior to activities such as painting and sculpture. It should be remembered that sewing was prohibited in the field of art, in 1768 the Royal Academy in London so decreed. Rozsika Parker mentions: “To know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women”, in his book The Subversive Stitch (1984), he made a review about the marginality of textile art in the art scene, due only to the fact of is produced by women.

The history of women weaves relationships with the context, which appear when we can recognize that everything private is political, then the border between the private and the public, the micro and the macro, becomes blurred because it puts the connections on the table and the power of personal experience with social and political structures and frameworks. Even, embroidery as a subversive act has several antecedents, for example, the artists’ suffrage league, founded by Mary Lowndes in 1907, created embroidered banners for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies that were carried out in some of the first large-scale demonstrations made in support of women’s vote. Embroidered banners were also used by unions and the cooperative movement.

Internationally, the group of artists dedicated to this practice is wide, just to mention a few: Anni Albers, El Anatsui, Alighiero Boetti, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Judy Chicago, Raisa Kabir. In Colombia the work of Olga De Amaral, Marlene Hoffmann and (I risk saying that) the work of Antonio Caro: Minera, a Colombian flag intervened with a black stripe and the word mining, are among others, some of the important references of textile art in Colombia.

CALCO for this 2018 presents the work of five Colombian artists who from different perspectives, techniques and media have approached textile art, proposing from the same sense of being of their production, a critical materiality: Andrea Rey, Juliana Silva Díaz, Carmen Espinosa, María Camila Velandia L. and Jeniffer Rojas García. The exhibition makes visible the political possibilities of the use of textiles, as a whole the works of the exhibition allow embedding textile production in diverse social frameworks: the path of “i-legality” that has traveled, the body, migration, uses non-westernized every day, the temporality of textile practices as an act of resistance to the real.

My grandmother always tells me: “You have to open the seam, iron it and make it look good on both sides”, iron-hard to see a succession of holes on two bodies joined by a line called thread, is not that a way of historicizing.

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Andrea Rey
Title: On your skin
Button suit
(Bobbin lace, fabric, macramé, photo printed on canvas)
2018
Her work proposes a relationship between skin and fabric, meat and textile, the skin contains the flesh and in turn is an organ, the largest in the human body, skin and fabric share characteristics: textures, colors, transparencies, porosities, sewing as suture, trace of two actions: the one that divided and rejoined. In her work Andrea makes the recognition of inhabiting a body that is also flesh, alive the organs move without stopping, the blood flows without stopping. Likewise, he wants to inhabit the textile material, the village of carnalities, soft pieces made of cloth with finishes of bobbin lace, spines and hair, which look like organs (kidneys, heart, liver, brain). Although there is a seemingly natural principle in the vitality and organicity of the body, the artist recognizes her artificiality, which is part of the social organ.

Carmen Espinosa
Title: Intermittence
Embroidery on coffee strainers and iron brackets
Variable dimensions – 2015
The artist works with elements loaded with meaning (wrappers, coffee bags, etc.) and intensifies her documentary potential, transforming them into traces and fragments full of historicity. From a political position, as a woman and citizen of the world, it generates impressions, questions and reflections that, although they have a personal origin, point to global social problems, such as migration, uprooting and discrimination.

Jeniffer Rojas
  Title: Verse / Reverse – Obverse Poetics
  Technique: Embroidery
  Variable dimensions -Materials: Fabric, appliques. Cotton fibers.

In her work, the artist builds what she has called: the politics of the obverse, the thread and the needle are forming a series of knots to build shapes, to tell a story, one that on the one hand allows us to see an image neat, “well made” of the clean invoice, just like the official story, however on the obverse the left footprint remains, which allows the front image to exist. The thread and the needle then pass through the fabric forming two images that coexist, that of the official history and the one that still underlies the secret, it is only necessary to observe what the history leaves.

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Juliana Silva Diaz
Juliana has developed her research around the historical materiality of textile work, her objective is to produce the critical conditions that allow that materiality to reveal itself, emerge as a political act of resistance against the actions that have sought to reify history, marginalizing what is not It serves to hold speeches of power. The sound of his pieces was inspired by the sound pattern that is generated when weaving with the loom pedal as if in his work we could recover the voices of the past, the lost and torn threads of history, bring from the present the presence of who have been marginalized from official stories. reconstructing through the tissue places for memory.

María Camila Velandia
Study of a House is the result of the investigation carried out by the artist in the Duya shelter, Casanare, on the Sáliba indigenous community, for them weaving “establishes multiple relationships between knowledge, doing and playing. The peoples weave the elements of nature to weave themselves and knot the knowledge. ” Through her research, María Camila recognizes her condition as a mestizo, who places her in the place of the other. The other is not the one who went to look, if not she who is recognized as a city woman in a city like Bogotá, which leads her to make the decision to make a study for her home, using natural elements: virgin moricha, chinchorros , are materials and forms that allow you to make your home in the middle of the city.