Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: We are here at El Museo del Barrio in
New York in front of a gallery wall covered in arpilleras, and we
are looking at one at the center of the exhibition. And here we
have an arpillera workshop, the type of workshop that produced the types
of work we are looking at. We're in the middle of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship,
and we are in a very tense and difficult time for politics and
the economy in Chile. Chloë Courtney: So how does this object relate
to that political context? There had been in Chile, a history of women
creating appliqué and embroidered narrative scenes like this one, but in
the context of the dictatorship, this technique became a way for people
to process their pain and their grief in a time when there was
a great risk of censorship and retribution for speaking out. So what we
see in the center of the composition is a large church with a
table surrounded by women who are represented as these little stuffed dolls,
and they're working with thread. And we see on the wall behind them
a textile with a crochet border and a scene of mountains and a
sun that is, in fact, very similar to the object as a whole.
Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: Beyond the building itself, we have the
town. We see the little houses, mostly female figures going about their
day, sweeping in front of their houses. We see the representation of nature.
We have the clever use of patterns with floral designs to represent the
trees and the leaves. Chloë Courtney: Initially, the creation of
arpilleras took place through the sponsorship of a Catholic organization
called the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the Vicariate of Solidarity. And this
organization was able to operate because it had the protection of the Archbishop
of Santiago. And one of their initiatives was to organize sewing circles
for the sisters and the mothers and the daughters of activists who had
been detained and disappeared to come together and talk about their missing
family members and to try to process their experience. One thing they did
was bring the sweaters and the clothing of their loved ones in order
to work that into the pictures they were creating. They also did things
like unravel their own sweaters to source yarn, so we can understand this
as a real conceptual embedding of their care and their love and their
grief into these objects. Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: We have a representation
here of the intimate reality of how the state violence was affecting these
families. We have a smaller arpillera, and we are inside the family home.
By the dining room table we see female figures seated, but there around
the middle ground, we find an empty seat with a question mark on
it, referencing the person that has disappeared: taken by the state.
We also see possibly another arpillera on the wall where we have a portrait
of a male figure, and it says, "Dónde está", where is he?
They don't have photographies. They don't have journalists that can publish
what is happening. So now the arpilleristas are taking the documentation
of their lives and of their emotions and of their experiences in their
own hands, and they are using a technique that they probably already use
at home. Chloë Courtney: There are at least three, if not more
techniques happening in most arpilleras: appliqué, or quilting; embroidery,
the ornamental stitches used to create the details; and then crochet for
the borders. At the end of the dictatorship in 1989, there was a
peaceful transfer of power, and some scholars hypothesize that these communities
of women that maybe represented the first time that these arpilleristas
were getting involved with politics empowered them and encouraged them to
get involved in other ways. They were empowered to say, "I'm not commenting
on the politics, but as a mother, where's my son? As a sister,
Where's my brother?" And to use this politics of care to go out
in the streets and protest and to speak openly, and that this created
the potential for the transition to a democratic system. As these sewing
circles continued, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad realized there was a big
interest in these objects, and they could easily be rolled up and hidden
in suitcases between layers of clothing. So they developed this network
of circulation to ship the arpilleras outside of the country secretly.
And they decided to also establish more workshops. More women got involved
who were not necessarily directly impacted by the death of a loved one
or the disappearance of a loved one, but who were nevertheless concerned
with what was happening. And so a body of themes began to emerge,
like protests where people are demanding work and justice and food to feed
their families. We see community efforts at recycling, which was a way to
earn a little extra money on the urban periphery where people would collect
cardboard. We see people instituting soup kitchens for their community so
that they could share resources. There are little bags of rice that really
make that idea of the soup kitchen come alive.
Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: It is very interesting how [a] workshop that started as a way to
support emotionally the women affected directly by the violence of the state
developed into a way of resistance, into a way for these women to
have some sort of control in the situation, to be able to denounce
the violence exerted against their family members against themselves. And
the Pinochet government was aware of the power of these images,
and they would try to destroy or hide these arpilleras if they could
get their hands on it. And the end result of the arpilleras is
very interesting because there's something very sweet in terms of the aesthetic.
But when they invite you to look into them, you see that there's
a subject matter that can be very tense, very heavy with the representation
of the violence of the state and the consequences of that violence in
the everyday.