Open Collections

Witkowski, Jacqueline

University of British Columbia

This dissertation examines how textile forms and metaphors came to be used by artists in the Southern Cone of South America after 1955, in a moment that was marked by authoritarian governments. Within the countries of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, textile materials, techniques, and concepts initially appeared under a modernist, primarily formalist paradigm. But as each country faced increasingly repressive regimes, artists harnessed such forms and traditions to address local historical and sociopolitical concerns. I examine how references to unspun wool and fiber, and threads more broadly, were not only explored through their material qualities but also acted as a process to engage the political context. Artists further utilized and adapted textile concepts through accompanying mediums such as poetry and forms of writing. The evocation of textiles accompanied an effort to relocate national narratives concerned with marginalized communities, such as Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous groups, who, during dictatorships, were further stripped of social programs and human rights. Through case studies of artists Lygia Pape in Brazil, Cecilia Vicuña in Chile, and Mirtha Dermisache in Argentina, this dissertation examines the specific ways in which each brought together a combination of textiles forms, materials, metaphors, and writing to address experiences of their volatile historical contexts. Therefore, my argument moves outside considering textiles as political solely based on their handmade quality or “low” status as craft, which permitted them to go undetected; rather, I am analyzing how their utilization in South America at a moment steeped in interconnected political and aesthetic challenges perhaps necessitated the textile as an operational force. I argue that the medium and concepts afforded by the textile – or what has recently come to be called “textility” – were able to provide alternative methods to understanding tumultuous historical situations and support avenues outside of dominant hegemons and forms. They established an expanded framework that could provide for the inclusion and recognition of peoples, histories, and techniques that had been pushed to the margins. The aim of this methodology, therefore, is to make visible what have been the very invisible historical and contemporary situations around colonization, disappearance, and processes of language.

Text

2025-05-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/78339

Art History

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/