Linguento, Los Rios, Chile, April 2024
This project is part of my ongoing research into ancestral textile practices as vessels of cultural memory and resilience. My work explores textiles as living languages, expressions of identity, history, and belonging that sustain deep connections between people, land, and time. Rooted in fieldwork, I combine photography, storytelling, and hands-on learning to engage with practices increasingly at risk of disappearance.
In Linguento, a rural village in the Los Ríos region of southern Chile, I spent several days with Frida, a Mapuche artisan and shepherd who carries the weaving knowledge of her mother and grandmother. She lives and works alone on her small farm and though her time to weave is limited, she sells her work at the local market every other day, her loom sits in her bedroom, where she weaves whenever she can.
Frida’s practice reflects an intimate relationship with her environment. I learned how she harvests and prepares wool from her own sheep, how the quality of the fiber changes depending on where it grows on the animal, and how she uses local plants for dyeing, which are harvested from her garden and gathered according to the lunar cycle, following cosmological rhythms. She shared one motifs passed down orally, explaining how each one holds personal and cultural meaning.
What struck me was the gap left by colonial disruption: many artisans today lack access to ancestral knowledge. Frida, who learned through oral transmission, now looks to books and online sources to fill in the silences. In her Ruka, she stores natural pigments, a hand-drawn family tree, and sticky notes with Mapudungun words, fragments of a language she is determined not to forget.
The Mapuche, one of the largest Indidenous groups in South America, were violently displaced and silenced during colonization. Their language was banned, their lands taken, and their culture systematically suppressed. Frida’s weaving, like her quiet repetition of Mapudungun, is an act of resistance and remembrance. I documented the process through photography and notes, focusing on gestures, materials, and the everyday intimacy of making.
This project centers on the evolving life of materials and the fragile, embodied knowledge they carry, holding space for stories often overlooked, yet vital to cultural continuity.