The material quality of textiles having a face and an underside configures relationships with the body, to the point of being the body, being skin open to the other. Thus, textiles say something about us (through its right side), and they embody/materialize a bond that literally touches us (through its reverse side).

Tania Pérez-Bustos, Textile companions, The Sage Handbook of Global Sociology.

This issue of post(s) seeks to critically engage with the growing interest in textile making across Latin American academic and artistic fields. We want to attend closely to this movement, acknowledging its material history and its political and everyday genealogies. Rather than simply embracing what appears to be emerging in the present, we seek to put it into tension by tracing its roots and its diffractions across time.

We understand textile making as a technology through which tools, gestures, and materials make worlds, traversing the present to bring forth memories of the past. More importantly, they embody particular ways of inhabiting the world (Hui 2025). As material-symbolic hybrids (Haraway 1988, 2004), textiles produce meaning; they tell us something about who we are: about our economies, our ways of being in time, and our bodies. There is beauty in this, but not only beauty. There is also power, possibility, indignation, and labor (Hunter 2019; Postrel 2020).

We have seen that in this resurgence of textiles—in their presence in the streets as a form of activism, in the use of textile practices as material and artistic techniques in exhibitions, and in the methodological reflections they invite within the humanities—the fabric’s right side is often brought to the fore, drawing attention to the details of its making and its capacity to generate bonds and alternative temporalities. Yet the reverse side of these surfaces often remains in the shadows. We speak of it allegorically, yes, but rarely go much further. We have become familiar with all that textiles can do: bring people intimately together, accompany, sustain memory, affect and be affected. Yet their excesses sometimes elude us.

We would like this issue to attend to these two inseparable sides of the fabric. To show that beauty, too, is marked by exhaustion, just as the inverse is also true: that the subtlety of an emergent textile practice can sustain everyday life and open spaces of possibility amid stagnation. While we accumulate countless threads and skeins of yarn that we never come to use, and discard fabrics without regard for the pollution they generate, we also treasure singular objects that we preserve with care and attention, finding in them mystical possibilities that help us attend more closely to the world and, at times, participate in its repair.

We hope this issue will make it possible to observe the world—with all its nuances—through the materiality of textile making and its tools, as a way of approaching both sides of the fabric. We want to ask how gender and class are learned alongside the skills of cutting and sewing fabric; to inquire into the politics of everyday life through which these practices take shape; into the minor geographies they inhabit—drawers, sewing boxes, and the corners of dressers; and to explore how the eye of a needle, the shape of a pair of scissors, or a sampler of stitches participates in the making of our subjectivities.

These practices, which open an inward space of attention, foster a critical and curious reflexivity that leads us to ask:

What role have these objects played in the production of life and capital? What might archaeology and the conservation sciences tell us about the possibilities and limits of these tools? How have art history and anthropology approached the fetishistic dimensions of these objects and artifacts? In what ways have fashion design and the visual arts used textiles to express the discontents of the world, while also imagining new languages through which to narrate what is yet to come?

What can a textile say that cannot be said otherwise? What forms of discourse does it produce through its own means—the weave, the reverse side, the repeated gesture? How has the field of art accommodated or excluded textiles? When has it named them craft, and when has it recognized them as art? What was at stake in that distinction?

We are here with textiles, sustained by practices of care and burdened by the world's excesses. Both at once. This issue invites us to trace these movements and to attend carefully to both sides of the fabric.

Guest editors

Tania Pérez-Bustos is a feminist anthropologist, professor at the School of Gender Studies at Universidad Nacional de Colombia , and co-founder of Artesanal Tecnológica. Her research explores technologies and dialogues between different knowledge systems. Through artisanal textile practices, she reflects on knowledge and care. She is drawn to textiles because they are traces of memory that prompt us to ask who we are. She is a second-generation migrant; her story comes from the South.

Virginia Sosa Santos is a Uruguayan artist, researcher, professor, and scenic designer whose work spans multiple artistic and discursive practices. Her practice brings together curatorial work and artistic research centered on textile knowledge, understood as historically feminized technologies, to challenge dominant narratives. This perspective takes shape through collective, site-specific practices rooted in local territories. Her independent, self-managed textile project is titled Nuevo Reino ("New Kingdom"). She is the author of The Power of Embroidery (2023), published by Penguin Random House. She is currently an M.A. candidate in Anthropology at the Facultad de Humanidades, Uruguay. 

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Sosa Santos, V. (2023). El poder del bordado. Penguin Random House.

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