SUMMARY Feminist Textiles Against Gender Violence: Engrams of Memory, Testimony and Affection

Abstract

In the context of feminist struggles throughout Latin America, there is a form of political activism that has begun to take shape. It is based on diverse artistic expressions, such as performance, music, plastic arts, dance, and, among them, also embroidery or weaving practices, in which diverse material, textual and symbolic wefts are interwoven for the construction of new logics of social organization parallel to those of the heteropatriarchal system. Various women's collectives, from Mexico to Argentina, leave the domesticity of their homes to join the feminist slogan ‘the private is political’ and denounce the gender-based and feminicidal violence that plagues the present, making use of practices that had relegated women for centuries to invisibility and obedience. This article addresses the reappropriation of these same practices with aesthetic and political uses based on three reading hypotheses. These textiles are considered as applied arts to the work of political denunciation because: 1. they draw on millenary expressive and gestural forms, ‘engrams of memory’ (Aby Warburg 2010) transmitted and intensified through their transformation over time; 2. they make use of a triple code, given by their textual, figurative and haptic quality, opening up new affective possibilities of knowledge; and 3. they function as a testimonial document, in the three senses that the genre has known in its historical development: by the urgency of the denunciation it expresses, by its vicarious character in giving voice to the victims, and by its self-referential character.