Reflections on conflict & protest textiles
In this guest post, Andrea Liu explores militarised violence and civilian resistance in the contexts of the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 80s. Another powerful read. See more here...
In the sixth part of the post series "The Needle as the Pen", our guest author Andrea Liu reflects on arpilleras from Peru and Chile that document economic crisis in Latin America in the 1980s. Read more...
In part 5 of her guest post "The Needle as the Pen", Andrea Liu reflects on how textiles were used in Chile and Argentina to denounce political violations by dictatorial regimes.
In this guest post, Andrea Liu reflect on how cloth relates to humanity in its mortality and transience – both cloth and our body can be cut, stitched, age, decay - and as a metaphor for life through cloth's restoration and mending. Another theme is cloth - in the form of headscarves, blankets and handkerchiefs - as a protest symbol. Read more...
In this post, Lydia Cole suggests conflict textiles as a promising site to learn (and unlearn) our ways of knowing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).
Wie bringt man entwaffnete Mitglieder einer Guerrillagruppe vor dem Hintergrund eines allgemeinen Klimas des Misstrauens nach Jahrzehnten des Krieges in Kolumbien dazu, sich gegenüber einer Gruppe von Wissenschaftlerinnen aus Kolumbien und Großbritannien zu öffnen und ihnen über ihr Leben zu berichten? In diesem Beitrag berichten Beatriz Arias und Berit Bliesemann de Guevara über ihr derzeitiges Forschungsprojekt und die textilen und narrativen Methoden, die sie einsetzen.
After decades of war and in a general climate of mistrust in Colombia, how do you convince disarmed members of guerrilla groups to open up to researchers from Colombia and the UK and to tell us about their lives? In this post, Beatriz Arias and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara report about their current research project, in which they employ narrative practices and textile-making as research methods.
En el contexto de un clima general de desconfianza después de décadas de guerra en Colombia, ¿cómo lograr que guerrilleros desarmados se abran a un grupo de investigadoras, para contarnos sobre sus vidas? En esta entrada, Beatriz Arias y Berit Bliesemann de Guevara cuentan de su proyecto con ex-guerrilleros en proceso de reincorporación, para el cual usan practicas narrativas biográficas y libros textiles.
"Textiles are the body’s first house, the body’s first architecture", American visual artist Ann Hamilton observed. In this guest post, Andrea Liu reflects on the the love affair between cloth and the body, textile and touch. Read more...
In this post we reflect on conflict textiles’ status as art, as well as on their potential, indeed their force, in pressing for (international) justice. As to the former question, we point out how conflict textiles complicate the very category of “art” – how they straddle divides between art, craft and activism, and how the medium of textile and the practice of needlework continue to be associated with femininity, domesticity and “mere” decorative purposes. With regard to the latter point, we describe the role that conflict textiles can play in trials and truth and reconciliation commissions, yet we also argue that their greatest value lies in the powerful work they do outside such formal justice processes.
