POLITICAL ART

Chili tapestry. 1980s


Tapestry made on burlap with a background cloth and figures formed with cutouts of different colors from plain colored fabrics, except for the one used to represent the Andean cord, stamped, and a perimeter guard formed with the base burlap. Measurements: 36 x 46 cm. Former Carlos Mordo collection.


In the scene, women and children reveal the absence of men, and are shown flying kites into the wind only accompanied by a faithful friend: a dog. That composition already has a political message. The tapestries reflected situations of injustice and opprobrium without metaphors, in a direct way, or expressed in the cry of silence all the pain that summoned them.


These works arose as a result of a Chilean women's movement during the military dictatorship (1974 - 1990) headed by General Augusto Pinochet. The organization expressed its rebellious attitude through these modest tapestries. Regarding the arpilleras, Isabel Allende said that this group was born after fear condemned poor women from marginal neighborhoods to silence, alone in the face of repression and the search for work by men in other regions of the country. "In these arduous circumstances -said the Chilean author-, an original form of protest was born: the arpilleras, small pieces of cloth sewn together like primitive quilts. Each one of these modest tapestries narrated something about the misery and oppression that the women endured during that period. With scraps of cloth and simple sewing, women embroidered what could not be told in words, and thus arpilleras became powerful forms of political resistance." (1)


Note:

1. In Marjorie Agosín: Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love – the Arpillera Movement in Chile 1974-1994. (USA. University of New Mexico Press. 1996).



S.O.XIX - OHM
AUTHOR AUTOR NO IDENTIFICADO

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