Del símbolo a la trama

Abstract

The commitment of many Latin American ethnic groups has been the vindication of the textile plastic expressions in a range that is quite their own, insofar as they submit themselves to the idea of opening surpluses of meaning instead of just representing or imitating a shape or an object. The indigenous textiles, besides the material characterization, subscribed to the qualities of the thread in its capacity to be woven, and to the fiber, in the diversity of configurations of the plot, are conditioned by the supernatural, the extraordinary, that is outside the world observable. The textile craft has established from its traditional processes, innumerable rhetorical relationships, especially metaphorical, between the image and textile materiality, assuming its characteristics, contextual relations and alternative displacement. They are therefore recurrent, the processes that take to the textile art towards mythical senses, identified mainly with sacred narrations that explain the world and the humanity; They are moral and religious examples, which are presented to us as if they were absolute and immovable truths in a frequently ritual context, and the taboo, a Polynesian word that integrates the meanings of the sacred, the untouchable, the forbidden and the malignant, those ideas that under no circumstances should be transgressed together with the reverential fear of a supernatural force that imposes terrible punishments on the offender. This concept has opened the doors of the metaphysical and the ontological, leading artisans to a profound interpretative exercise that has oscillated between superstition and caution before the unknown, marking as a constant the contradictions that this implies, the meaning of the opposites express in triscaidecafobia-triscaidecafilia, sympathy and aversion, the profane and the sacred imposed on objects with a unique expressive force.