About the textile art day in Malba

During the Textile Art Day, organized by the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba), which was opened by Verónica Rossi, curator and promoter of this initiative, the purpose was to reflect on its origin and tradition in the country and its drifts in contemporary art. And it is a fact that, among the debate tables where artisans, artists and experts in the field gathered, the reference to the Quipu stood out.

This three-dimensional accounting system used by Andean cultures to transmit messages through knots, colors and textures was the topic presented by Margarita Ramírez, a descendant of the Diaguita-Calchaquí people. The founder and member of the Tinku Kamayu Cooperative revisited the ancestral past of that method from the present, without losing sight of the future, with the strong intention of capturing that journey in a book.

Ramírez – a technician in Visual Arts, graduated from the Aurora School of Santa María de Catamarca – delved into the value that the Quipu had in the records of the harvest or the finds of gold and silver. Although also as a calendar and to account for births and deaths. She insisted on the union she proposed and the imperative need to keep it alive. “I asked myself, how to convey this beauty?” she said.
Something that can also be read in harmony with the exhibited Quipu menstrual, the monumental work of the Chilean Cecilia Vicuña, hanging in the triple height of Malba. This work refers to the Chilean author's manifest support for the election of President Michelle Bachelet in January 2006.
It is known that this was the way she found to vote: by mounting the work - as blood from the glaciers - at the foot of El Plomo hill in the vicinity of the city of Santiago. Expression that later had a new version for a specific site at the Palacio de La Moneda Cultural Center, composed of twenty-eight red wool threads and a video that documented the previous ritual performance. In addition, she included a letter to Bachelet where she begged him to annul the authorization of the Pascua Lama Project, to prevent the destruction of three glaciers in the north of the trans-Andean country.

Also in Soñar el agua you could see the so-called missing Quipu that is part of Eduardo Costantini's collection. A reinterpretation where Vicuña alludes to the legacy of kidnappings and murders of the Latin American dictatorships of the 20th century. This work can also be seen as an act of resistance by recovering that method devastated by the Spanish conquest, considering it subversive.

In this last Quipu, the textile artists Guillermina Baiguera, Laura Morales, Adriana Pavic and Ana Paula Méndez collaborated, who were also in charge of closing the Textile Art day with a performance on the museum terrace. There, they retraced the process of assembling the pieces composed of natural wools with which they worked before the opening of the exhibition.