Published 2023-12-15
Keywords
- textile,
- loom,
- Practices of sensitivity
Copyright (c) 2023 Helen Ascoli, Negma Coy, Luisa González-Reiche
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Abstract
Weaving on the backstrap loom is weaving with another being, one that reflects and responds to the person who weaves it. In Mayan languages, such as Kaqchikel, its parts are named as the body that it is: it has a face, a back, feet, a stomach that eats, and a heart that beats.
X and E
This present being accompanies us in those “in-between” moments of other experiences, revealing both presences and absences.
I declare this revealing of presences and absences in a literal, not metaphorical, sense. For when weaving, the forms X and E eat and swallow, change and organize, co-creating the textile and inscribing themselves in the textile-texts of those who weave it.
X traverses Guatemalan collective memory. It marks and reveals the disappeared, the unacknowledged memories, both intimate and political.
E combs the threads, organizing all that feels unspeakable. Here, in E, it is touched and takes form.
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