Voces de hilo y aguja: construcciones de sentido y gestión emocional por medio de prácticas textiles en el conflicto armado colombiano

Reflexivity in research teams through narrative practice and textile-making

“…Firstly, the ‘making’ aspect of needlework creates time for becoming aware, feeling, remembering, and reflecting; revolving around notions of mending, unravelling, and recomposing materially and emotionally, it also enables resignifications (Gauntlett, 2018; Ingold 2013). Secondly, when carried out in groups, textile-making creates spaces and relations of trust, affect, and mutual care, which allow individuals to express their experiences and collectives to establish and/or resignify relations (Bello Tocancipá & Aranguren Romero 2020: 189; Pérez-Bustos & Chocontá Piraquive 2018: 5–7). Finally, textiles also have an embodied effect on their makers and audiences (Andrä et al, 2019; Thamen and Knights, 2019); as textile artist Mercy Rojas explains: ‘The textile narrative is a language that can only be transmitted from and received with the body.’ 5 We observed these affective rather than intellectual resonances among the audiences of our project exhibitions, but also recognized them in how team members related to each other’s experiences, thoughts, and stories when relayed through textiles, which in turn contributed to the process of coming together as a team.…”

Crafting Stories, Making Peace? Creative Methods in Peace Research

“…As Andrea Carolina Bello Tocancipá and Juan Pablo Aranguen Romero found in textile-making with women victims of the Colombian conflict, so long as someone lacks the necessary (manual/practical) skills, 'all their efforts will go into comprehending the task itself', yet once they have acquired a 'tacit knowledge of the practice, thinking and movement become one and the same thing'. 132 Giving rise to new ideas about oneself and the world, this coincidence of manual doing, reflective thinking, and affective sensation can produce 'meanings that span the embodied, the relational and the emotional'. 133 When I asked Jhonatan whether one could say that textile-making was helping him in his transition to civilian life, he replied that 'yes, embroidery helps because it is.…”

Crafting ecologies of existence: More than human community making in Colombian textile craftivism

“…Existing literature and institutional initiatives engaging with craft collectives in the context of the conflict have focused mainly on the role of textile craft for the reconstruction of historical memory and reconciliation, the documentation of the armed conflict, or in the work of mourning (Belalcazar Valencia and Molina Valencia, 2017; Bello Tocancipá and Aranguren Romero, 2020; Gonzáles Arango, 2015). This work pays close attention to content of stories and narrations of the textiles.…”