An “arpillera”, which literally means burlap in Spanish, is a brightly coloured patchwork picture depicting scenes of daily life. They are made predominantly by groups of women, known as arpilleristas. The construction of arpilleras became popular in Chile during the military dictatorship (1973–90) of Augusto Pinochet, when they were used to protest and document the injustices of the regime.

This workshop will explore the relationship between community safety and textiles as living archives that document experience. Soledad Fátima Muñoz will facilitate and live-translate the workshop presenter, Bélgica Castro Fuentes, who is based in Malmo, Sweden via Zoom. Participants will be encouraged to explore their experiences of community safety and care through the arpillera form.

Bélgica will teach participants a method using textile scraps (donated by the Textile Museum) to create their own arpillera square. Participants can bring any scrap fabric material that they would like to include in their arpillera. Each of the individually created arpillera will then be sewn together, resulting in a collective arpillera.

These workshops are presented in partnership with the Textile Museum of Canada. The Textile Museum of Canada hopes to install these projects in their community gallery space in early 2023.

Make sure to register for the second workshop with Hector Maturana Bañados.

Accessibility:

Those who require additional assistance or support to participate are welcome to send us a request. Please request this assistance at least three days in advance of the event. To do so, or for any additional information please contact accida@brampton.ca

PRESENTERS

Soledad Fátima Muñoz is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural worker and researcher born in her family’s exile in Canada and raised in Rancagua, Chile. Her work seeks to explore the ever-changing social spaces we inhabit and the archival properties of cloth. Through the investigation of the materiality of sound and the understanding of the woven structure as the continuation of our interconnected social gesture, her practice seeks to fabricate embodied instances that participate in the construction of a more equitable society and the creation of new archives of resistance. In 2017, she co-founded CURRENT "Feminist Electronic Art Symposium and Mentorship,” a multidisciplinary, electronic art program working with women, non-binary, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) artists in Canada and beyond. Her latest collaborative audiovisual project entitled “La Parte de Atras de la Arpillera'' features a collection of interviews with Chilean textile workers whose experiences stitch together the country’s history of resistance. Soledad has been the recipient of several awards, including the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago New Artist Society Full Merit Scholarship, the Emily Carr University of Art + Design President’s Media Award and most recently the Textile Society of America Student and New Professionals Award.

Bélgica Castro Fuentes started embroidering arpilleras in Santiago, Chile, in 1978 and was part of The Arpillera Workshop of The Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared. She was invited to join this group because of her ongoing search for her husband, who was detained and disappeared forever by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet on October 6, 1973. The group got together once a week to talk, embroider, and remember their loved ones who had disappeared. They made visual stories through fabrics and threads, leaving a testimony of what was happening, making their tragedy visible, and denouncing the atrocities that the civil-military dictatorship committed. The Vicariate of Solidarity would then sell these works abroad. Castro was then exiled to Sweden, where she has been living since 1986 and has developed an incredible body of work in the two cities where she has lived these last years, first Vaxjo and then in 2005 she moved to Malmö.