Three Dimentional Appliqué Textiles of Chile, c. 1985 – 1998 Sewing for Resistance
From the Education Collection of The William Benton Museum of Art
The images are for educational purposes only and present a sample of the collection. For permission to
reproduce, please contact the Registrar at The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, 860-486-1707.
Like many people in the rest of the world, the rock singer “Sting” was moved by the courage and pain of the women who were relatives of the “disappeared and detained”. He visited Chile and the arpillera workshops and was especially touched when he witnessed these women doing the GUECA, a traditional Chilean courtship dance that is performed annually. The women were dancing alone, wearing a photograph of their husband or lover who was gone on their blouses.
Album notes from They Dance Alone. “On the Amnesty Tour of 1986 the musicians were introduced to former political prisoners, victims of torture and imprisonment without trial from all over the world. These meetings had a strong affect on all of us. It’s one thing to read about torture, but to speak to a victim brings you a step closer to the reality that is so frighteningly pervasive. We were all deeply affected.”
Written and recorded By “Sting”
From the album Nothing Like the Sun
Why are these women here dancing on their own?
Why is there this sadness in their eyes?
Why are the soldiers here
their faces waxed like stone?
I can’t see what it is that they despise
They’re dancing with the missing
They’re dancing with the dead
They dance with the invisible ones
Their anguish is unsaid
They’re dancing with their fathers
They’re dancing with their sons
They’re dancing with their husbands
They dance alone They dance alone
It’s the only only form of protest they’re allowed
I’ve seen their silent faces scream so loud
If they were to speak these words
they’d go missing too
Another woman on the torture table
What else can they do
They’re dancing with the missing
They’re dancing with the dead
They dance with the invisible ones
Their anguish is unsaid
They’re dancing with their fathers
They’re dancing with their sons
They’re dancing with their husbands
They dance alone They dance alone
One day we’ll dance on their graves
One day we’ll sing our freedom
One day we’ll laugh in our joy
And we’ll dance
One day we’ll dance on their graves
One day we’ll sing our freedom
One day we’ll laugh in our joy
And we’ll dance
Ellas danzan con los desaparecidos
Ellas danzan con los muertos
Ellas danzan con (the invisible ones)
Their anguish is unsaid
Danzan con sus padres
Danzan con sus hijos
Danzan con sus esposos
Danzan solas
Scraps Of Life: Chilean Arpilleras, by Majorie Agos’n (Red Sea Press, 1987)
Chilean Women and the Tapestries of Solidarity, a newspaper article by Marcelo Chalin, a Chilean architect doing graduate work in sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. The article appeared in the campus newspaper of York’s Atkinson College in September 1983.
FURTHER READING ON THE ARPILLERAS OF CHILE:
Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love: The Arpillera Movement in Chile by Marjorie Agos’n
Why Women Protest: Women’s Movements in Chile (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics) by Lisa Baldez
A Language of Women A selection of pieces of literature by Chilean women writers.
From “Chilean Women and the Tapestries of Solidarity”
They speak with a language that comes close to the extremes of life and death. Here we have a language of women who often have difficulties in speaking or writing “properly,” or in speaking before groups. Here we have women who have created a new language, one that can be understood by everyone and which creates bridges. Over these bridges, in one direction, comes support from those who have not been directly affected by the situation in Chile, and also from those who have. In the other direction comes, from the once defeated, their version andtheir vision, their side of the story is an irrefutable way. How, otherwise, can a woman from a poor neighborhood at the other end of the world, someone who has seen the abduction of her husband or the death of her son, leave an indelible testimony of her pain? How else can she tell us about her life from then on?
Thousands of anonymous women have done it with their tapestries.
As in all languages, this one too has evolved, as have the arpillera makers. If in the beginning they were persons searching in despair, through their own work they now better understand their condition, the reasons for it. It is no longer a question of fate; their understanding has become political, as have their organizations and their actions. They do not ask any more, they demand; they no longer hide, they strike, they protest, and they express it through their tapestries. These are the same women who go on hunger strikes, who chain themselves to doors of the Supreme Court demanding justice, who pilgrimage to the execution sites, who march in the streets with loud voices. Then they go back to their workshops and tell us of their chaining, their hunger, their anger, their victories. They write still another page of their testimony.
These handicrafts stand for no less. The arpilleras have succeeded in telling and transforming, two basic qualities of any language. They are giving us a vision of reality which otherwise would have been lost, and at the same time they are transforming that same reality they are portraying. From this point of view, the arpilleras represent non-violent, revolutionary language. They mark the nature of the Chilean resistance. These women have not been using the knife, they have not needed or wanted to kill. They have created their own effective words to describe the actions of others and their own.
“Chilean Women and the Tapestries of Solidarity,” a newspaper article by Marcelo Chalin, a Chilean architect doing graduate work in sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. The article appeared in the campus newspaper of York’s Atkinson College in September 1983.
From “Scraps of Life: Chilean Arpilleras”. Pages 51-52.
Technical assistance for making arpilleras was provided by volunteers trained in the plastic arts, women like Valentina Bonne, a painter. According to the accounts of the women, they were told first to make scenes of their daily life, the things they saw and to express what they felt. They began by cutting out little figures, but they were flat lifeless and without movement. Their first houses were all similar and made of gray cloth. The women themselves say they never thought anyone was going to buy what they were making; that they were ugly and that nobody would be interested in the lives of poor people.
After this stage, however, the women learned to observe more carefully, and it was as though in trying to see their own modest surroundings with more clarity, they were led to a clearer vision of what was happening in the country. “I walked around like and idiot,” one woman told me. “I looked closely at everything. I believe I learned how to see.”
An artist writes of the beginning of arpillera making:
After the military coup I was out of a job like so many others. In a short time the Pro-Paz committee asked me to develop some craft work projects with women. The first group assigned to me were women of families of the detained-disappeared: mothers, wives, sisters. At the end of my interview with them, it was clear to me that in their state of anxiety they would not be able to concentrate on anything but their own pain. I could hardly believe what I had heard, sons, husbands, brothers, snatched with bows and threats to their families, pregnant women carried off, couples including their small children, all disappeared for weeks and even months, with nobody knowing anything about them, not seen about newborns or the older children and even less about the adults.
Everything I had been thinking about doing with these women was useless, since the future work we would undertake together ought to serve as a catharsis. Every woman began to translate her story into images and the images into embroidery, but the embroidery was very slow and their nerves weren’t up to that. Without knowing how to continue I walked, looked, and thought, and finally my attention was attracted by a Panamanian mola, a type of indigenous tapestry. I remembered also a foreign fashion very much in vogue at that time: “patchwork.” Very happy with my solution the very next day we began collecting pieces of fabric, new and used, thread and yarn, and with all the material together we very quickly assembled our themes and the tapestries. The histories remained like a true testimony in one or various pieces of fabric. It was dramatic to see how the women wept as they sewed their stories, but it was also very enriching to see how in some way the work also afforded happiness, provided relief.
The words of three arpilleristas: Two stories and a poem
Santiago, January 14, 1985
My story is very simple and more than that sad. I belong to the Association of the Families of Detained-Disappeared and am arpillerista at the same time. When I make the arpilleras I am thinking not only of my own problem, but of all the families without distinction because of political beliefs. This work is done under the wing of the Vicarate, that also buys the work from us, that helps us survive. The work began ten years ago, with the disappearance of thousands of Chileans beginning from the 11th of September, 1973. The suffering and anguish for my daughter, daughter-in-law, and little grandchildren and myself is very great, but still I don’t lose hope of seeing my son alive again. By A mother.
A poem:
I WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW MY SON
THAT YOUR NAME RUNS
THROUGH THE BEADS OF MY ROSARY
To think that they made you disappear
Just after you reached your 22nd year
If you know son
How I search for you from dawn to dusk,
I know that your ideal was just
For your people, now their rights
Are trampled on.
No longer are you with your people
But I will take your place
Because I am sure one day
Our people will be freed.
I wanted to kill myself if my son didn’t come back within six months. But later my companions told me to resign myself, that we all had the same pain, that they were suffering the same.
So my fight began, I said to myself I had to survive this blow because I have to know where my son is and I have to see that man fall who is in the government.
The other women of the Association of the Detained-Disappeared welcomed me very warmly and I began to gain strength and courage and began to take legal steps possible after the detention of my son.
A lawyer made the appeal for the protection of civil rights that I personally carried to the Supreme Court. I began to make the rounds of all the hospitals, the morgue, the Psychiatric Hospital, the International Red Cross, the different detention centers, I covered all the jails of the zone.
At this time the Association of the Detained-Disappeared had a van for the use of us family members who were searching for a detained one. Through the Vicarate of Solidarity we could talk with other political prisoners and ask them if they had seen my son, we took photos for them to see when we made our inquiries.
That’s how I knew my son was detained in Villa Grimaldi. Six people swore before a minister of the court that they had seen him there, that he was all right, that he hadn’t been tortured, but one night they had him say good-bye to his friends because he was being released, and since then nothing more has been known of him up to this date.
From “Scraps of Life: Chilean Arpilleras” by poet and human rights activist, Marjorie Agos’n, a professor of Latin American Literature at Wellesley College.(Red Sea Press, 1987).
Chilectra: Name of the Chilean national electric company
Fabrica: factory
La justicia no trans: no compromise on justice
Libertad: freedom
No al despido de los profesores: no to the firing of teachers
No hay leche: no more milk
No hay no: no more office hours today
No mas CN: no more secret police
No + muerte: no more death
Olla comun: common pot (soup kitchen)
Policlinico: poly clinic treating many health conditions
Por la libre expresion: for the freedom of speech
Poroto: bean
Registros electoales: electoral registration
Sindicato: union
Solidaridad: solidarity
Taller: workshop
Todos juntos: all together
Trabajo: work
Zona de hambre: hunger zone
Political Protests
Daily Life
Propaganda
Other
Folk art? Messages of protest? Historical records? Chilean arpilleras (are-pea-air-uhs, burlap in Spanish) are all of these. The brightly-colored patchwork pictures stitched onto sacking are chronicles of the life of the poor and oppressed in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s during the totalitarian military regime of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.
Poor women and women whose husbands, sons, or brothers were killed or imprisoned by the government met each week around crowded tables in one-room workshops on the outskirts of Santiago, where they shared their burdens and stitched small but meaningful tapestries. Their handwork told the outside world of their hunger, fear, unemployment, housing shortages, and their missing men folk who are still referred to in Chile as the “disappeared” and “detained.”
Arpilleras served to document and denounce oppression in a country where all normal channels of free expression were closed. To the women, making arpilleras was a way to share their sorrows and concerns. To present-day viewers, arpilleras are a testament to the women’s extraordinary strength and survival through tremendous suffering and loss.
Once each month, the new arpilleras were collected from each workshop and taken to the Vicaria de la Solidaridad (Vicarate of Solidarity), an ecumenical human rights group of the Catholic Church in Santiago that distributed them internationally. Since the Chilean government considered them traitorous and forbid them to be shown or sold in the country, the earliest arpilleras were smuggled out of the country in diplomatic pouches. Packages and suitcases suspected of containing them were confiscated.
To protect the women, who were known as arpilleristas, their tapestries were generally unsigned, though the Vicaria turned over to them all the profits they received from selling the works abroad. Often, this money was the only income the women had.
Contemporary political unrest brought arpilleras into being, but their roots date back to the 1960s when a Chilean cottage industry began producing decorative embroidery of domestic scenes using brightly colored yarn. But after the coup in 1973, wool was scarce and unemployment was at 25%, partly because relatives of the disappeared and detained were barred from most jobs, so the arpilleristas turned to making fabric appliqu work in the Vicaria workshops, which were organized as support groups. While the earliest arpilleristas were the survivors of husbands, brothers, and sons who had disappeared after Pinochet came to power, shantytown dwellers and other destitute women in and near Santiago later joined in the craft.
Standards for arpilleras developed quickly. At first, arpilleras were the size of a large placemat, about 14″x18″, but later smaller and larger ones were made as well. A mural sized one measuring 6′ square was made from several arpilleras sewn together. Reviewers in the workshops inspected the arpilleras for both quality and content, a practice that was established early. The reviewers were most often women whose design and sewing talents were recognized as superior and who also served as informal teachers. Very likely, the discussions they had with workshop members on technique, design, and theme were helpful.
Themes for the arpilleras were decided weekly by each workshop group. However, each arpillera was the work of an individual who developed the design at the workshop, continued sewing on it at home, and brought the finished piece to the next meeting. Each workshop generally had about twenty women. Each woman was allowed to make just one arpillera a week unless her need for money was so great that the group decided she could make two. More than 250 Chilean women became arpilleristas during the time.
The Vicaria established a few rules for the workshops with regard to what could and could not be shown in the designs. Explicit scenes of torture, for example, were prohibited, as were other frankly political or “too strong” themes, as the Vicaria termed them, icons that might provoke the government to arrest or harm the arpilleristas. The only words allowed on arpilleras were those that would normally appear in reality, as on banners carried by protesters or names on buildings and sides of trucks. Traditionally, the Andes Mountains were depicted in the background, confirming that the stories took place in Chile.
Arpilleras have many common elements. Bits of fabric are cut in the shapes of houses, trees, or objects and are stitched to the backing. Figures of people are almost always three-dimensional, with little rolled arms, heads and bodies coming out of a flat background. Sticks, bits of foil, plastic, or paper, dried beans, and other commonly found materials are frequently sewn or glued onto the tapestries. Simple decorative topstitching fills in the details. Each arpillera is bordered by a colorful fabric binding, blanket stitch, or crocheted wool edging. Older women with failing eyesight helped by stuffing the heads for the figures and crocheting the borders.
Certain images appear over and over. Big black kettles sitting on fires represent the community soup pots (ola comun) that Chilean churches provided in Santiago’s “hunger zones.” Also frequently seen are the cooperative bakeries and laundries that were organized to help the poor survive, as well as the arpillera workshops (talleres). Many arpilleras show children standing in milk or clinic lines, washing cars or scavenging for cardboard to sell. Bands of protesters are seen carrying banners or distributing political flyers, both of which were illegal acts. The national militarized police appear frequently, wearing dark uniforms and driving tank- like vehicles. Threads spilling out of a nozzle can represent the water that poor women got from a community pump for their daily needs or the contaminated water that was sprayed on protesters by militia determined to break up a street demonstration. Other threads represent electric lines that people hooked up illegally from their houses to the main power lines in order to steal electricity after the government shut theirs off. The dangerous practice of hooking up happened every evening, and the unhooking was done every dawn since people feared arrest more than accidental electrocution. Doors of factories and hospitals have big X’s stitched on them to indicate that they were closed to families of the disappeared or detained.
It’s important to note that the arpilleristas had no training in art. Some were definitely talented, and some had distinctive ways of portraying trees, mountains, or houses that made their work recognizable. While the tapestries rarely show technical sophistication, they more than make up for it in their powerful sense of design, strong colors, and gripping subject matter. Small as the images are, they speak simply and movingly about particular events and the daily hardships of Chilean life.
It should be said that not every arpillera depicts soup kitchens, demonstrations, arrests, or candlelight vigils for executed political prisoners. Some show life as the arpilleristas might have wished it waswith thriving markets, good health care, happy children, and a peaceful countryside. In fact, it can be argued that all Chilean arpilleras expressed hope for a better future, with the sun rising over the Andes, bringing a new day.
Once a foreign market for the tapestries was established, arpilleras from other sources began to appear in the marketplace. Some women, along with some men, who believed that the arpilleras that came out of the Vicaria workshops were too timid in their themes, produced arpilleras with strong political themes. By contrast, these government-sanctioned workshops of women loyal to the dictatorship produced propagandizing arpilleras, filled with happy themes depicting Chile as a prosperous country with benevolent rulers.
Over time, people in other Latin American countries adopted arpilleras as an art form. Among them were Peru, where some believe their three-dimensional doll-like figures are said to have originated, as well as Colombia and Nicaragua. Their arpilleras almost always depict an innocent, happy world.
Chilean arpilleras became an influence on fine art in Chile where artist-printmakers were inspired by their imagery and design. An exhibition of their prints in Santiago was firebombed by the militia in the 1980s. A few of the prints reached the United States.
It’s clear that the arpilleristas of Chile ultimately learned the delights of creating art. As these oppressed women turned to sewing for solace and income, they grew more self-confident, thoughtful, and independent, and learned of the pleasure to be found in color, texture, shape and form. By telling their painful stories fearlessly and truthfully, they became citizens of a world larger than anything they or their mothers had ever known. It is no wonder that their arpilleras have been called “the revolutionary banners of modern Chile.”
These 20 slides of scenes in Chile show how vividly the arpilleras reflected the world that the arpilleristas sewed into their patchwork tapestries. The Benton Museum is grateful to Professor Hernan Vera, a Chilean who teaches at the University of Florida, Gainesville, for making these images that he photographed in his homeland available to us and (on a loan basis) to you.
In 1988 the museum’s Education Department purchased 50 Arpilleras from the Vicaria de la Solidaridad, Santiago, Chile for the Education Collection.
The Vicariate of Solidarity was an agency of the Catholic Church, Chile, established by Pope Paul VI at the request of Cardinal Ral Silva Henrquez. Its role was to assist the victims of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s military dictatorship during the 1970s and 1980s.
For permission to reproduce, please contact the Registrar at The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, 860-486-1707.
To host a docent-led tour at your school, please contact the education department at 860-486-1711. Note: Docent led tours are for schools no more than 40 miles from the museum.