Towards an epistemology of textiles: Keys to an understanding in and from the South

Abstract

The history of ideas is plagued by absences, dispersions and transgressions. One of them is the one that operates on textile know-how, which continues to be traversed by logics of silencing, devaluation, and dismissal. This article starts by investigating those mechanisms that favor this exclusion, even in the present, in order to propose other ways of reading and understanding textile expressions in all their dimensions. Based on a series of interviews with women weavers and embroiderers in our American territory (from Chile to Mexico, passing through Argentina), some of the characteristics that determine the configuration of a textile epistemology are explored, namely: the creation of individual and collective femealogies, the interweaving of diverse materialities and corporeally situated reflexivity. The results show that, for many women who recover and work with textiles, creative practice is closely linked to a research process in which the fabric becomes a text with its own grammar that must be learned to decipher, and the text becomes a promise of collective construction in and from the South.