Weaving through the Threads of Life

Bolivian artist Elvira Espejo Ayca is not only a weaver but also an insightful thinker about modern Andean textiles. In recent publications, she has described textiles as “living beings” and weaving as a “tridimensional” art form that requires makers to contemplate and manipulate multiple layers of thread simultaneously. Peruvian art historian Horacio Ramos, the recipient of the Cisneros Institute’s Latin American Collection Fellowship in 2022, recently spoke with Espejo Ayca about the importance of considering textiles from the perspective of the weavers rather than exclusively as flat surfaces—a perspective often overlooked by art scholars and curators today.
—Horacio Ramos, Cisneros Institute Latin American Collection Fellow

Este artículo está disponible en español.
Translated from Spanish by Christopher Winks.

Horacio Ramos: Elvira, besides being a textile artist and poet, you’ve written academic studies. In your most recent book, El textil tridimensional (Three-Dimensional Textiles), you compare thinking about textiles in terms of flat surfaces to “separating body and mind.”¹ Why do you consider a textile to be a three-dimensional object and even a living being?

Elvira Espejo Ayca: Studies of Andean textiles from the 1970s and 1980s were focused on their surface beauty or iconography, on what was perceived by the retina.² This perspective was based solely on two-dimensionality, as if it were a piece of paper. But when you speak with the weavers, you see that the textile is three-dimensional. It’s a complex structure with a surface layer, where you display the color and the technique. But you also have to decide which colors you’re going to bring to the lower layer, and then what you’re going to conceal in the middle. Therefore, seen through the act of its making, a textile is no longer a thing limited by aesthetics or beauty. That’s the perspective of three-dimensional thought: not to think of the textile as resulting from a single action, but as the product of various actions coordinated among themselves. It’s very interesting: it’s like having three types of work at once. This also has to do with the sensibility of a woman weaver, who can do three or four things at the same time.

Art history is also quite “retinal,” as you say.

Quite retinal, indeed. The problem is that when you don’t begin with practice, errors start occurring. Because many scholars are talking from their desks, with a vision focused on the eye. I watch you on the screen, the way you move, your gestures and actions, and I describe that; but I’m not aware of the space you’re in, what you eat, and what your sensibility is. That’s where the error resides. That’s why I also say that a textile is like a person: we can’t think about its structure without [metaphorically] thinking about its muscles or the nourishment that sustains it. For this reason, I say that a textile is not an object but a subject that constructs itself and grows little by little. The history of textiles has focused on surface beauty, but it doesn’t take into account the force fields involved in the act of weaving, generating multiple connections. It’s very important for the communities themselves, as speakers of Indigenous languages, to converse in these languages: this generates a different debate.

When you say “force fields,” are you referring to the different people—the shepherd, the person who dyes the wool, the weaver—who form part of the chain of textile production?

The person, tool, and daily life are all in play. This collective dimension doesn’t exist in Eurocentric anthropocentrism. The traditional researcher doesn’t do the weaving; were she to do that, her theories would be different.