Textus - An Exploration on Texts and Textiles

Saturday July 5, 2025 | 3:30 – 5:00 pm

Location: RU House at Colonels Row, Building #404B on Governors Island (map)Ferry information | Video directions

Free Workshop

Limited to 15 participants. RSVP required.

Textus – An Exploration on Texts and Textiles departs from the shared etymology of “text” and “textile,” both rooted in the Latin word textus, meaning “thing woven.” Led by Anthropologist Amalia Uribe Guardiola, the participants will be invited to explore the deep interconnections between writing and weaving—how stories and memories are threaded through both language and cloth. Drawing from Latin American poetry and textile practices, we’ll engage with words and materials to consider how texts are knitted and textiles written. How can we read textiles? How can we unweave texts? What is the role of unmaking in understanding? Participants will be invited to write, read, play, embroider and explore the limits between texts and textiles.

The workshop will begin with a collective unthreading of fabric while reflecting on participants’ personal connections to texts and textiles. From there, the group will engage with photographs of Chilean arpilleras (colorful, hand-sewn appliqués created by women to denounce political violence during the Pinochet dictatorship) and Colombian chumbes (narrow, handwoven sashes traditionally made and worn by Indigenous communities in the south of Colombia. Chumbes are wrapped around the waist as part of everyday and ceremonial dress, and are rich in geometric patterns that encode ancestral knowledge, identity, and cosmology) to discuss how textiles can be read as cultural and political texts. In the final segment, attendees will embroider a word, symbol, or image of their choice onto fabric—no prior textile experience is required, since basic embroidery techniques will be taught. All materials will be provided, including fabric, embroidery thread, needles, and scissors. The session will conclude with time for reflection and closing remarks.

About

Amalia Uribe Guardiola is an Anthropologist from Bogotá, Colombia, whose work explores the intersection of museums, craft, oral history, and migration. She is particularly interested in collective textile-making practices as spaces where complicity, orality and materiality intertwine. She has collaborated with the artist Lina Puerta and collectives such as BordeAndo to design and lead sewing circles that center communal storytelling and creation. She has held artist residencies at the Magdalena River Museum (Honda, Colombia) and Casa Taller El Boga (Mompox, Colombia), where she explored the cultural and material significance of the rocking chair along Colombia’s longest waterway. Currently, she is pursuing a Master’s degree in “Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement” at New York University (NYU), working as the program coordinator for the “Colombian Studies Initiative”.

This workshop is organized and facilitated by Danny Valera, Intern at Residency Unlimited, as part of her ongoing research and curatorial interests in participatory practices and cross-cultural dialogue.