Through the creation of arpilleras, women spoke out against the violence of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Arpilleristas (unidentified women artists, Chile), Arpilleras, 1980s, embroidered and appliquéd cloth, crochet, and mixed media, varied dimensions (El Museo del Barrio, New York). Speakers: Chloë Courtney, Marica and Jan Vilcek Curatorial Fellow, El Museo del Barrio and Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño, University of Puerto Rico
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0:00:05.6 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.
0:00:31.1 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.
0:01:23.2 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.
0:01:41.2 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.
0:02:33.1 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.
0:03:21.6 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.
0:05:15.2 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.
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