1
00:00:00,010 --> 00:00:07,600
Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: We are here at El Museo del Barrio in

2
00:00:07,600 --> 00:00:13,220
New York in front of a gallery wall covered in arpilleras, and we

3
00:00:13,220 --> 00:00:16,500
are looking at one at the center of the exhibition. And here we

4
00:00:16,500 --> 00:00:21,100
have an arpillera workshop, the type of workshop that produced the types

5
00:00:21,100 --> 00:00:25,600
of work we are looking at. We're in the middle of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship,

6
00:00:25,660 --> 00:00:29,600
and we are in a very tense and difficult time for politics and

7
00:00:29,600 --> 00:00:33,100
the economy in Chile. Chloë Courtney: So how does this object relate

8
00:00:33,100 --> 00:00:38,940
to that political context? There had been in Chile, a history of women

9
00:00:39,140 --> 00:00:44,340
creating appliqué and embroidered narrative scenes like this one, but in

10
00:00:44,340 --> 00:00:49,380
the context of the dictatorship, this technique became a way for people

11
00:00:49,520 --> 00:00:54,180
to process their pain and their grief in a time when there was

12
00:00:54,340 --> 00:00:58,600
a great risk of censorship and retribution for speaking out. So what we

13
00:00:58,600 --> 00:01:03,020
see in the center of the composition is a large church with a

14
00:01:03,020 --> 00:01:08,720
table surrounded by women who are represented as these little stuffed dolls,

15
00:01:08,800 --> 00:01:13,120
and they're working with thread. And we see on the wall behind them

16
00:01:13,440 --> 00:01:18,420
a textile with a crochet border and a scene of mountains and a

17
00:01:18,420 --> 00:01:22,900
sun that is, in fact, very similar to the object as a whole.

18
00:01:22,910 --> 00:01:24,860
Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: Beyond the building itself, we have the

19
00:01:24,860 --> 00:01:30,020
town. We see the little houses, mostly female figures going about their

20
00:01:30,020 --> 00:01:34,480
day, sweeping in front of their houses. We see the representation of nature.

21
00:01:34,760 --> 00:01:39,480
We have the clever use of patterns with floral designs to represent the

22
00:01:39,480 --> 00:01:42,960
trees and the leaves. Chloë Courtney: Initially, the creation of

23
00:01:42,960 --> 00:01:48,260
arpilleras took place through the sponsorship of a Catholic organization

24
00:01:48,260 --> 00:01:52,600
called the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the Vicariate of Solidarity. And this

25
00:01:52,600 --> 00:01:56,900
organization was able to operate because it had the protection of the Archbishop

26
00:01:56,963 --> 00:02:02,120
of Santiago. And one of their initiatives was to organize sewing circles

27
00:02:02,220 --> 00:02:06,080
for the sisters and the mothers and the daughters of activists who had

28
00:02:06,080 --> 00:02:10,000
been detained and disappeared to come together and talk about their missing

29
00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:13,700
family members and to try to process their experience. One thing they did

30
00:02:13,700 --> 00:02:18,500
was bring the sweaters and the clothing of their loved ones in order

31
00:02:18,500 --> 00:02:22,200
to work that into the pictures they were creating. They also did things

32
00:02:22,200 --> 00:02:26,900
like unravel their own sweaters to source yarn, so we can understand this

33
00:02:26,900 --> 00:02:31,200
as a real conceptual embedding of their care and their love and their

34
00:02:31,200 --> 00:02:34,220
grief into these objects. Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: We have a representation

35
00:02:34,220 --> 00:02:38,640
here of the intimate reality of how the state violence was affecting these

36
00:02:38,640 --> 00:02:43,340
families. We have a smaller arpillera, and we are inside the family home.

37
00:02:43,620 --> 00:02:49,010
By the dining room table we see female figures seated, but there around

38
00:02:49,020 --> 00:02:52,940
the middle ground, we find an empty seat with a question mark on

39
00:02:52,940 --> 00:02:57,260
it, referencing the person that has disappeared: taken by the state.

40
00:02:57,260 --> 00:03:01,680
We also see possibly another arpillera on the wall where we have a portrait

41
00:03:01,720 --> 00:03:05,340
of a male figure, and it says, "Dónde está", where is he?

42
00:03:05,440 --> 00:03:08,760
They don't have photographies. They don't have journalists that can publish

43
00:03:08,760 --> 00:03:12,540
what is happening. So now the arpilleristas are taking the documentation

44
00:03:12,540 --> 00:03:16,340
of their lives and of their emotions and of their experiences in their

45
00:03:16,340 --> 00:03:20,140
own hands, and they are using a technique that they probably already use

46
00:03:20,140 --> 00:03:22,980
at home. Chloë Courtney: There are at least three, if not more

47
00:03:22,980 --> 00:03:27,700
techniques happening in most arpilleras: appliqué, or quilting; embroidery,

48
00:03:27,720 --> 00:03:31,880
the ornamental stitches used to create the details; and then crochet for

49
00:03:31,880 --> 00:03:36,000
the borders. At the end of the dictatorship in 1989, there was a

50
00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:42,260
peaceful transfer of power, and some scholars hypothesize that these communities

51
00:03:42,260 --> 00:03:46,170
of women that maybe represented the first time that these arpilleristas

52
00:03:46,227 --> 00:03:50,360
were getting involved with politics empowered them and encouraged them to

53
00:03:50,360 --> 00:03:54,940
get involved in other ways. They were empowered to say, "I'm not commenting

54
00:03:54,940 --> 00:03:58,700
on the politics, but as a mother, where's my son? As a sister,

55
00:03:58,710 --> 00:04:02,200
Where's my brother?" And to use this politics of care to go out

56
00:04:02,200 --> 00:04:05,820
in the streets and protest and to speak openly, and that this created

57
00:04:06,060 --> 00:04:10,860
the potential for the transition to a democratic system. As these sewing

58
00:04:10,880 --> 00:04:15,020
circles continued, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad realized there was a big

59
00:04:15,020 --> 00:04:20,020
interest in these objects, and they could easily be rolled up and hidden

60
00:04:20,040 --> 00:04:24,720
in suitcases between layers of clothing. So they developed this network

61
00:04:24,720 --> 00:04:30,260
of circulation to ship the arpilleras outside of the country secretly.

62
00:04:30,300 --> 00:04:36,140
And they decided to also establish more workshops. More women got involved

63
00:04:36,340 --> 00:04:41,340
who were not necessarily directly impacted by the death of a loved one

64
00:04:41,340 --> 00:04:44,315
or the disappearance of a loved one, but who were nevertheless concerned

65
00:04:44,320 --> 00:04:48,560
with what was happening. And so a body of themes began to emerge,

66
00:04:48,580 --> 00:04:54,500
like protests where people are demanding work and justice and food to feed

67
00:04:54,500 --> 00:04:59,500
their families. We see community efforts at recycling, which was a way to

68
00:04:59,500 --> 00:05:03,120
earn a little extra money on the urban periphery where people would collect

69
00:05:03,320 --> 00:05:07,800
cardboard. We see people instituting soup kitchens for their community so

70
00:05:07,800 --> 00:05:12,040
that they could share resources. There are little bags of rice that really

71
00:05:12,120 --> 00:05:14,980
make that idea of the soup kitchen come alive.

72
00:05:14,984 --> 00:05:19,020
Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: It is very interesting how [a] workshop that started as a way to

73
00:05:19,420 --> 00:05:24,040
support emotionally the women affected directly by the violence of the state

74
00:05:24,220 --> 00:05:29,620
developed into a way of resistance, into a way for these women to

75
00:05:29,620 --> 00:05:33,340
have some sort of control in the situation, to be able to denounce

76
00:05:33,340 --> 00:05:36,960
the violence exerted against their family members against themselves. And

77
00:05:36,960 --> 00:05:40,460
the Pinochet government was aware of the power of these images,

78
00:05:40,460 --> 00:05:45,760
and they would try to destroy or hide these arpilleras if they could

79
00:05:45,760 --> 00:05:48,441
get their hands on it. And the end result of the arpilleras is

80
00:05:48,800 --> 00:05:52,700
very interesting because there's something very sweet in terms of the aesthetic.

81
00:05:52,740 --> 00:05:56,460
But when they invite you to look into them, you see that there's

82
00:05:56,460 --> 00:06:01,000
a subject matter that can be very tense, very heavy with the representation

83
00:06:01,100 --> 00:06:05,040
of the violence of the state and the consequences of that violence in

84
00:06:05,040 --> 00:06:05,540
the everyday.