Follow a manual added link
Research Log
Speaking Back to an Incomplete Archive
Textile as Means of Critique
by Paula Carcamo
Fig. 1-3: Mercedes Azpilicueta, Lady’s Dreams or Stop Right There Gentlemen!, 2019, cotton and wool jacquard textile, 157 × 600 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Photo: Marcel de Buck & Peter Cox.
Fig. 4-5: Violeta Parra, Fresia y Caupolicán (Fresia and Caupolicán) (detail), 1964–65, dyed jute fabric with embroidery, 142 × 196 × 4.5 cm. Colección Violeta Parra, Pontificia, Universidad Católica de Chile. © Fundación Violeta Parra, courtesy of Colección Violeta Parra, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Critical reinterpretation of history is also key in Parra’s Fresia y Caupolicán. Through this tapestry made in the mid-1960s, the artist reframes Spain’s colonization of Chile. She critiques the idea of the Spanish as a civilizing force and centers the Mapuche people in their own story. Fresia y Caupolicán takes up a vignette, Canto XXXIII, from the sixteenth-century epic poem The Araucaniad by Spanish soldier and poet Alonso de Ercilla. From his limited point of view as a supporter of the military, Ercilla describes the Spanish colonization of southern Chile in a Renaissance epic style with heroic character archetypes and strict rhythmic structure. While this style was popular in Europe at the time, it did not reflect the worldviews of the Mapuche people that it depicted. Parra was deeply influenced by Mapuche knowledge and was a folklorist who studied Chile’s art and culture. Her weaving depicts a moment in The Araucaniad, where Caupolicán, the Mapuche toqui, has been captured by the Spanish. Upon realizing that he has been captured alive, his wife, Fresia, throws their baby at his feet. Unlike in Ercilla’s account, which devotes a mere stanza to these events, Parra pauses here to magnify the horror and indignity of the Spanish conquest. Instead of romanticizing violence, Parra focuses on the more intimate impact of this violence on Fresia and Caupolicán’s family. Through this tapestry, Parra highlights the injustices of history that have been written from colonial perspectives.
Fig. 6: Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Austral (detail), 2012, unspun wool and sound, site-specific installation at 18th Biennale of Sydney, dimensions variable. Collection 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine . © Cecilia Vicuña (Artist Rights Society / Pictoright), courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. © Barbican Art Gallery. Foto: Jemina Yong.
While Cecilia Vicuña’s Quipu Austral does not focus on a particular colonial story, her use of the quipu (knot) in this work—and throughout her practice—is a form of critical reclamation.
Quipus are ancient Andean tools for record keeping, which were banned and destroyed during Spanish colonization. They consist of knots along a colored string or series of strings and may also have narrative and storytelling purposes that have yet to be deciphered. The stories that Quipu Austral tells are bound up in the colonial history of Chile and Australia. Quipu Austral was created for the 18th Biennale of Sydney and consists of many flowing unspun wool strands. The strands are not knotted; instead, when people walk through the quipu, they become the “knots.”[3] Vicuña’s use of the quipu in Quipu Austral and her other monumental quipus does not aim to simply recreate destroyed material culture, but rather to use the ancestral knowledge imbued in this form to speak to the destruction wrought by colonization.[4] As curator and art historian Catherine de Zegher points out in her essay “Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots,” the use of textile and weaving in Vicuña’s practice can be understood as a “dynamic model of resistance.”[5] This stands in stark contrast to the way that textiles, including those produced in Latin America, have been historically devalued and considered outside of the realm of “art” by the West.
Vicuña, Parra, and Azpilicueta’s works demonstrate how textiles can be a powerful tool of decolonial critique in which the form (textile) and the content (critical reinterpretation) strengthen one another. Their critical retellings and reinterpretations form a different kind of archive, one that not only makes space for, but centers, women and Indigenous people. Yet, as Saidiya Hartman points out in her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” there is a productive tension between the necessity and the impossibility of narrating the lives of “the subaltern, the dispossessed, and the enslaved.”[6] These artists use this tension to create, and in a similar spirit, the critical reimagination of the ways in which works are presented within an exhibition can also be generative of different, valuable, meanings. Every framework, lens, or theme that is employed colors the meaning that emerges from the works.
About the Author
Paula Carcamo is a former curatorial intern at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She has a Masters in Arts and Culture, with a specialization in Design Cultures, from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and has previous academic experience in Latin American Studies and Anthropology. As an intern at the Stedelijk, Carcamo contributed to various projects, including Unravel.
[1] Wells Fray-Smith, Lotte Johnson, and Amanda Pinatih, eds., Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art (London, Munich, and New York: Prestel, 2024), 198.
[2] See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940).
[3] See Quipu Austral (2012), Cecilia Vicuña.
[4] Miguel A. López, “A Thread of Life: Retrieving Power through Textiles,” in Unravel, 29.
[5] Catherine de Zegher, “Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as Knots,” in The Textile Reader (London and New York: Berg, 2012), 142.
[6] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 12.
