WEBVTT 00:00:00.010 --> 00:00:07.600 Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: We are here at El Museo del Barrio in 00:00:07.600 --> 00:00:13.220 New York in front of a gallery wall covered in arpilleras, and we 00:00:13.220 --> 00:00:16.500 are looking at one at the center of the exhibition. And here we 00:00:16.500 --> 00:00:21.100 have an arpillera workshop, the type of workshop that produced the types 00:00:21.100 --> 00:00:25.600 of work we are looking at. We're in the middle of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, 00:00:25.660 --> 00:00:29.600 and we are in a very tense and difficult time for politics and 00:00:29.600 --> 00:00:33.100 the economy in Chile. Chloë Courtney: So how does this object relate 00:00:33.100 --> 00:00:38.940 to that political context? There had been in Chile, a history of women 00:00:39.140 --> 00:00:44.340 creating appliqué and embroidered narrative scenes like this one, but in 00:00:44.340 --> 00:00:49.380 the context of the dictatorship, this technique became a way for people 00:00:49.520 --> 00:00:54.180 to process their pain and their grief in a time when there was 00:00:54.340 --> 00:00:58.600 a great risk of censorship and retribution for speaking out. So what we 00:00:58.600 --> 00:01:03.020 see in the center of the composition is a large church with a 00:01:03.020 --> 00:01:08.720 table surrounded by women who are represented as these little stuffed dolls, 00:01:08.800 --> 00:01:13.120 and they're working with thread. And we see on the wall behind them 00:01:13.440 --> 00:01:18.420 a textile with a crochet border and a scene of mountains and a 00:01:18.420 --> 00:01:22.900 sun that is, in fact, very similar to the object as a whole. 00:01:22.910 --> 00:01:24.860 Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: Beyond the building itself, we have the 00:01:24.860 --> 00:01:30.020 town. We see the little houses, mostly female figures going about their 00:01:30.020 --> 00:01:34.480 day, sweeping in front of their houses. We see the representation of nature. 00:01:34.760 --> 00:01:39.480 We have the clever use of patterns with floral designs to represent the 00:01:39.480 --> 00:01:42.960 trees and the leaves. Chloë Courtney: Initially, the creation of 00:01:42.960 --> 00:01:48.260 arpilleras took place through the sponsorship of a Catholic organization 00:01:48.260 --> 00:01:52.600 called the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the Vicariate of Solidarity. And this 00:01:52.600 --> 00:01:56.900 organization was able to operate because it had the protection of the Archbishop 00:01:56.963 --> 00:02:02.120 of Santiago. And one of their initiatives was to organize sewing circles 00:02:02.220 --> 00:02:06.080 for the sisters and the mothers and the daughters of activists who had 00:02:06.080 --> 00:02:10.000 been detained and disappeared to come together and talk about their missing 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:13.700 family members and to try to process their experience. One thing they did 00:02:13.700 --> 00:02:18.500 was bring the sweaters and the clothing of their loved ones in order 00:02:18.500 --> 00:02:22.200 to work that into the pictures they were creating. They also did things 00:02:22.200 --> 00:02:26.900 like unravel their own sweaters to source yarn, so we can understand this 00:02:26.900 --> 00:02:31.200 as a real conceptual embedding of their care and their love and their 00:02:31.200 --> 00:02:34.220 grief into these objects. Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño: We have a representation 00:02:34.220 --> 00:02:38.640 here of the intimate reality of how the state violence was affecting these 00:02:38.640 --> 00:02:43.340 families. We have a smaller arpillera, and we are inside the family home. 00:02:43.620 --> 00:02:49.010 By the dining room table we see female figures seated, but there around 00:02:49.020 --> 00:02:52.940 the middle ground, we find an empty seat with a question mark on 00:02:52.940 --> 00:02:57.260 it, referencing the person that has disappeared: taken by the state. 00:02:57.260 --> 00:03:01.680 We also see possibly another arpillera on the wall where we have a portrait 00:03:01.720 --> 00:03:05.340 of a male figure, and it says, "Dónde está", where is he? 00:03:05.440 --> 00:03:08.760 They don't have photographies. They don't have journalists that can publish 00:03:08.760 --> 00:03:12.540 what is happening. So now the arpilleristas are taking the documentation 00:03:12.540 --> 00:03:16.340 of their lives and of their emotions and of their experiences in their 00:03:16.340 --> 00:03:20.140 own hands, and they are using a technique that they probably already use 00:03:20.140 --> 00:03:22.980 at home. Chloë Courtney: There are at least three, if not more 00:03:22.980 --> 00:03:27.700 techniques happening in most arpilleras: appliqué, or quilting; embroidery, 00:03:27.720 --> 00:03:31.880 the ornamental stitches used to create the details; and then crochet for 00:03:31.880 --> 00:03:36.000 the borders. At the end of the dictatorship in 1989, there was a 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:42.260 peaceful transfer of power, and some scholars hypothesize that these communities 00:03:42.260 --> 00:03:46.170 of women that maybe represented the first time that these arpilleristas 00:03:46.227 --> 00:03:50.360 were getting involved with politics empowered them and encouraged them to 00:03:50.360 --> 00:03:54.940 get involved in other ways. They were empowered to say, "I'm not commenting 00:03:54.940 --> 00:03:58.700 on the politics, but as a mother, where's my son? As a sister, 00:03:58.710 --> 00:04:02.200 Where's my brother?" And to use this politics of care to go out 00:04:02.200 --> 00:04:05.820 in the streets and protest and to speak openly, and that this created 00:04:06.060 --> 00:04:10.860 the potential for the transition to a democratic system. As these sewing 00:04:10.880 --> 00:04:15.020 circles continued, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad realized there was a big 00:04:15.020 --> 00:04:20.020 interest in these objects, and they could easily be rolled up and hidden 00:04:20.040 --> 00:04:24.720 in suitcases between layers of clothing. So they developed this network 00:04:24.720 --> 00:04:30.260 of circulation to ship the arpilleras outside of the country secretly. 00:04:30.300 --> 00:04:36.140 And they decided to also establish more workshops. More women got involved 00:04:36.340 --> 00:04:41.340 who were not necessarily directly impacted by the death of a loved one 00:04:41.340 --> 00:04:44.315 or the disappearance of a loved one, but who were nevertheless concerned 00:04:44.320 --> 00:04:48.560 with what was happening. And so a body of themes began to emerge, 00:04:48.580 --> 00:04:54.500 like protests where people are demanding work and justice and food to feed 00:04:54.500 --> 00:04:59.500 their families. We see community efforts at recycling, which was a way to 00:04:59.500 --> 00:05:03.120 earn a little extra money on the urban periphery where people would collect 00:05:03.320 --> 00:05:07.800 cardboard. We see people instituting soup kitchens for their community so 00:05:07.800 --> 00:05:12.040 that they could share resources. There are little bags of rice that really 00:05:12.120 --> 00:05:14.980 make that idea of the soup kitchen come alive. 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 00:05:19.420 --> 00:05:24.040 support emotionally the women affected directly by the violence of the state 00:05:24.220 --> 00:05:29.620 developed into a way of resistance, into a way for these women to 00:05:29.620 --> 00:05:33.340 have some sort of control in the situation, to be able to denounce 00:05:33.340 --> 00:05:36.960 the violence exerted against their family members against themselves. And 00:05:36.960 --> 00:05:40.460 the Pinochet government was aware of the power of these images, 00:05:40.460 --> 00:05:45.760 and they would try to destroy or hide these arpilleras if they could 00:05:45.760 --> 00:05:48.441 get their hands on it. And the end result of the arpilleras is 00:05:48.800 --> 00:05:52.700 very interesting because there's something very sweet in terms of the aesthetic. 00:05:52.740 --> 00:05:56.460 But when they invite you to look into them, you see that there's 00:05:56.460 --> 00:06:01.000 a subject matter that can be very tense, very heavy with the representation 00:06:01.100 --> 00:06:05.040 of the violence of the state and the consequences of that violence in 00:06:05.040 --> 00:06:05.540 the everyday.