Stitching the world anew. Embroidery in the contemporary art from Latin America.

Artists from Latin America explore embroidery quite innovatively and freely nowadays. They test this medium by stretching the limits of its employment and by experimenting with different materials used to stitch and apply on. They research the vernacular and habitual fields and methods of its usage to continue, manipulate, transcend, or subvert them. As a result, they demonstrate that embroidery, a demanding technique with a long history and multitude of cultural and social connotations, still offers fascinating and powerfully evocative visual language suitable to speak about various issues.

Embroidery is chosen today by male and female artists, self-taught and academically trained, across the region. They often have very different motivations and reasons for picking it up in their practice. Some are intrigued and driven towards it because of its traditional aspects, links to gendered social practices,  luxury and decorative facets as well as folk and indigenous craft. Others are interested in the physical dimensions of threads and materials that are stitched. They investigate the fibres and textiles to make a conscious and aesthetic decision about what they work with. Few substitute conventional threads with metal and plastic wires or textiles with paper and rocks. The majority of them underline that embroidery requires time, focus, and planning, as it involves long hours of solitary work that helps in meditation, self-exploration, and outer-world contemplation. This process is an important part of the aesthetic they go for. Few who rely on artisan or indigenous traditions take the opposite route, and they prefer a collective approach that also has a performative aspect in itself. 

In effect, embroidered works from Latin America can be seen today as small-scale, handy independent pieces or large, site-specific soft sculptures, installations, or registered and participatory performances. They are exhibited in prestigious regional and global institutions such as Tate Modern, MOMA, Guggenheim, and MALBA are on sale at international art fairs like Frieze, Art Basel Miami, or Armory Show. Though this technique previously was perceived as feminine, decorative, or crafty and as such was frequently displayed in ethnographic or design institutions, it is now treated as a multifaceted and mouldable instrument of communication used by contemporary artists who want to speak about the ecology, gender-based violence, costs of neoliberalism, the emancipation of minorities, LGBT communities and rights.

Old connotations and new applications

Embroidery is as old as human civilisation. Archaeologists found fossilised remains of hand-stitched decorated clothing that are dated to 30 000 BC. Its earliest traces were found in Asia, the Middle East and Scandinavia. In Latin America, the oldest embroidered textiles were discovered in Southern Peru, in burial chambers of the Paracas Culture (c.700 B.C.E- 200 C.E).

Historically and irrespectively of different cultures, this technique was used to embellish and raise the value of textiles. Materials decorated this way were treated as luxury items, splendid and sumptuous.  In consequence, they were reserved for special occasions and religious or state rituals. Church hierarchy, nobility, royal courtiers and kings, queens wear embroidered clothing.  Their expensive value was related to the labour, skill, time, fibres, and threads needed to produce them.  It was the women’s work. This was the intricate craft also predominantly done by feminine hands. However, in Latin America it has also been an occupation of indigenous groups, that, throughout pre-Hispanic times and after Spanish colonisation, developed different styles and iconography used for ornamental and narrative purposes. Textiles, including embroidery, were professions done predominantly by women in native groups.

Teresa Margolles often uses this traditional connotation of embroidery in her practice. She benefits from its typical function and embellished industrial textiles soaked in blood, bodily fluids of dead victims, gendered-based or narco violence, women, migrants, and trans people. In her work, displayed in the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009, Margolles designed a performative element. She asked volunteers to stitch with gold and silver thread narco messages on bloody textiles. The artist wanted to leave the exhibition place and provoke an interaction on the streets, so passers-by could be exposed to the death, violence, and tragedy of living in Northern Mexico. The juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness, attraction and abject in this work, due to the mix of gold embroidery and human remains, provokes strong mixed feelings and bodily reactions in the viewer. Embroidered shrouds convey the love, care, and longing of the loved ones who lost their close ones due to violence.

Margolles goes one step further with subsequent art intervention and participatory actions in Guatemala, Panama, Bolivia and Brazil. She asks communities of survivors, women and transwomen to design their embroidery and then stitch it to the fabric soaked in the blood and sweat of the victim together. During communal artistic practice, they add something beautiful to the dirty textile. They talk about their situation, violence, discrimination, and vulnerability.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a Brazilian artist Fabio Carvahlo, referred to a similar abject aesthetic in an art piece Necropolítica Nacional (ELES QUEREM NOS MATAR!)/National Necropolitics (THEY WANT TO KILL US!). He embroidered a message on a tissue soaked in his blood, which was also decorated with red lace.The artist reflected on the new way of living in quarantine;  the seclusion, isolation,  and the immense fear of another human being. Carvahlo explored the emotions created by the new restrictions, when the borders were reduced to our homes, our skin, and the respiratory masks that promised to separate us from the disease. By adding lace and embroidery he aimed to transform anguish, horror, fear, and anxiety, into something that could give us some purpose. This transformation of the horrific, appalling material with care, attention to detail, vibrant red ornament around the fabric perimeter suggests agency even in the hardest times.

Paraguayan artist who resided in Argentina, Feliciano Centurión embroidered short poems on domestic textiles, like aprons, tablecloths, and pillowcases, to manifest love, devotion, care, and affection with pretty, kitschy visual gestures. When he got sick with HIV in the early nineties, he turned to the craft which he learned from his mother and grandmother. During the last two years of his life, he registered tender, sublime messages and affirmations on fabric scraps. In this case, the context is tragic but embellished by the use of embroidery. Such a display of affection makes life more bearable and sweet. 

Showcased examples present how the conventional function of embroidery is paired with postmodern aesthetics of abject and queer, to strengthen the artistic aim and to trigger conflicted emotions and ambiguous reactions of the viewer. The style and iconography are appropriated, or inspired by kitsch, folk, and ethnic imagery. This way it evokes simple, light, common patterns of what is conceived as pretty, nice, and worth looking at. Therefore it draws viewer’s attention and evokes different emotions such as attraction,  or repulsion. 

In addition, in the case of male artists, taking the socially conditioned practice of embroidery is a strategy that confronts the stereotypes and gender divisions. By choosing it, men want to speak about intimacy, the need for closeness, and care. As embroidery requires attention, time, devotion to repetitive action and creative aim, these male artists manifest their capability and need for these values.

Material considerations and experiments. 

Embroidery requires threads, needles, and some kind of support. Historically, threads were of natural fibres, animal and plant-based. Supports were also natural; either cotton, wool or linen were used.  Industrialisation introduced synthetic fibres and machines in the region, new threads, industrial supports like ready-made fabrics (blankets, homeware), and sewing machines started to be used before the Second World War. 

Contemporary Latin American artists make conscious choices during stichting; they play with the physical and symbolic aspects of threads and supports. As a  result, the medium has undergone experiments which resulted in highly innovative applications of embroidery.

Peruvian artist Ana Teresa Barboza, at the beginning of her career was more focused on the cultural meaning of the textiles and their ways of changing the image of a person, of protecting the inner world of a person and at the same time exposing emotions, attitudes, and relations of that person with others and the exterior world. It was also a moment when she was still designing and producing fashion, and a period when her romantic relationships were tumultuous. She then picked synthetic fibres for stitching and industrially produced textiles. From that time, a couple of works are worth mentioning: Tus palabras son lo unico que tengo en nuestra relacion a distancia (2006,  patchwork with embroidered phrases from dialogues between a couple), Atlas de anatomias comparadas (2007, cross stitched portraits of two couples, smooth, surface of the piece is exposed as well as the messy, hideous backside), Instrucciones (2009, serie o 12 images, black embroidery on white fabric, sewing clothes is similar is a metaphor for creating a relationship). 

At some point in her life, Barboza became interested in nature, and began working on the themes of ecosystems, landscapes, flora and fauna of Peru. From that moment on, she travelled extensively around her country. These journeys led her to explore the connections between local communities and the land. She discovers the traditional processes of fibre and textile production that are heavily dependent on minerals that come from soil, rivers, oceans, and impact plants and animals. The artist abandons ready-made supports, and introduces organic fibres coloured in natural pigments and dyes in her practice. She now combines photography, crochet, embroidery, and weaving to unravel the visible and invisible layers and processes of Peruvian nature. She creates innovative landscapes, where the craft (reference to vernacular culture) is intertwined materially and symbolically with scientific images of ecosystems. Here the series of works like Suspensiones (2012), Leer el paisaje (2016), Inmersion (2017), Detrás del textil (2017).

This concern for the material, which Ana Teresa Barboza manifests and translates as an important message of her works, makes her work original. The attention to the way threads are sourced and made, connects her with the agricultural and artisan communities. It also leads to her collaborations with craftsmen and women in a couple of art projects such as Cinco tintes vegetales de Lambayeque (Five dyes from Lambayeque), 2017 (traditional weaver Elvia Paucar), or  Manto: Unión de las fuerza, installation done together with her partner Rafael Freyre and with indigenous artists from Guatemala: ​​ Dinora López, Álida López,  Claudia Telón, and Catalina Hernándezfor Bienal Arte Paiz in 2021. What is distinctive in her practice, in comparison with former generations of textile artists, is mentioned in the attribution of a given work of all authors. 

Embroidery, an antiquated technique, is transformed by Ana Barboza thanks to a scientific, investigative approach to it. It is also reinterpreted into landscape art. Finally, it is treated in a vernacular and collaborative way. Johanna Calle from Colombia and Ana Linnemann from Brazil also experimented with the medium, although they tested different supports. Johanna Calle approaches it from her dominant visual language: drawing. She creates lines with stitches on paper, for example, in pieces Barrio Alto and En Alto. She reaches out for traditional threads but she creates “embroidery-looking” works with wires stitched on paper like in the series Submergentes. Conceptualist and minimalist artist Ana Linnemann, because of her ongoing interest in the habitus and nature of things, completely switches into unusual supports and threads. She created “a rag” out of alabaster stone stitched with wires. She embroidered colourful flowers with cross stitches on rocks.

Calle and Linneman uncover that the embroidery practice involves a lot of emotional content. By adding it to rocks, paper, or by using wires instead of fibres, they expose its inherent components: intimacy, care, and tenderness that comes from the manual and time-consuming nature of this medium.  

Technical concerns and constraints.

Embroidery, technically speaking, refers to the action of adding stitches to a fabric.  In this way, different patterns are created by lines, images, and textures on soft textiles. There are over 300 stitches and at least 12 embroidery styles. They give a varied appearance and feel to the final product. Latin American contemporary artists were either taught by their mothers and grandmothers, or they are self-taught. As a result, we can observe various levels of proficiency in their needlework. However, the origin of their skill acquisition does not predetermine the technical mastery of the artwork. Argentinian artists Chiachio & Giannone, claim that they “are always trying to test the extreme limits of embroidery. We use all kinds of embroidery stitches: buttonhole stitch, chain stitch, blanket stitch, rope stitch, couching, Cretan stitch, Roman stitch, stem stitch raised band, raised lattice band, guilloche stitch, French knot, Chinese knot, buttonhole Wheel, spider’s website, ribbed spider’s web, seed stitch, plaid filling stitch, Roumanian couching, blanket stitch, satin stitch, satin stitch encroaching, long and short stitch, surface darning, etc.”By using them, artists build heavily saturated, vibrant, and excessively elaborate images. Artists’ proficiency in using the medium is a part of their artistic manifest. They are men who embroider like nobody else can. It’s mind-blowing and counterintuitive how skilful they are.  It means that, as with this craft, any cultural division of what is masculine or feminine is artificial, not natural. So, not only in their themes, but also in the medium itself, the message is hidden.  They deconstruct and question gender roles by being embroidery masters.

Johanna Calle, Ana Teresa Barboza, and Rick Rodrigues use stitching in entirely different ways. They strip the embellishment effect and apply embroidery as if they drew delicate lines on paper, outlining silhouettes of faces, bodies, and objects. Their images are reduced in a visual meaning, , to the bare minimum to give more volume and power to the message. 

Calle’s piece Nombre Propio documents 1538 nameless, orphaned, or abandoned children who found themselves in this position due to the internal turmoil in Colombia. The images were found in the newspaper. They are kids without a name, without parents, left vulnerable without protection. It took her two years to complete this piece.  In this case, the process and faces outlined by stitching translate the amount of personal and national trauma caused by the internal wars. 

Ana Teresa Barboza’s series called Instructions looks like storyboards that depict the relationship making and dissolving with the allegory of sewing. As clothes are intimate protections and barriers to our bodies, the relations are something that build and destroy us sometimes. Here, embroidery is like a sketch of an artist’s life (Ana Teresa Barboza portrays herself in it). The curatorial text writes about this piece: “On this occasion, embroidery distances itself from the application of decorative patterns and becomes a narrative tool. Through finely stitched vignettes and applications of photographs transferred to fabric, embroidery takes on the forms of drawing and painting. This narrative is evident in the first group of embroidered drawings in which the artist presents us with a series of instructions to follow (or precautions to take) in diary format. While he introduces us, step by step, to the process of constructing a garment, Barboza establishes the first parallel between emotional relationships and garments: both are tied, sewn by sometimes invisible threads and their process of tailoring can be painful.”

Rick Rodrigues explores the delicate, tender, intimate spheres of our lives. Therefore his needlework is typically simple and graphic. His installation, General Treaty of the Greatness of the Infinite, constructed with tiny embroidered items, revolves around the topos of home. It is a poem stitched onto a white surface, used to tell a story of a serene childhood. The delicate lines that tell the story of a boy are used on purpose to draw, and carefully sketch memories. 

Guillermina Baiguera’s tests and trials with embroidery led her to an original turn in this medium. She dissolves stitches she made, cuts them, gets rid of them, and leaves the fabric with visible loose threads or little holes through which the stitch went.

Another technical innovation can be observed in the practice of Felipe Coaquira. He transforms vernacular embroidery traditions from the Colca Valley and applies them to create large and medium-scale “pictures”. Coaquira uses a sewing machine to “paint” Peru’s historical facts, customs, and legends. He is by training watercolours painter and this medium aesthetic is visible in the works. 

The novelty of contemporary times is to mix media. It is also the turn that embroidery is going through. Threads are stitched to drawings,  photography,  ready-made industrial textiles like pillows, blankets, aprons, tablecloths, clothes, and fibre art. Embroidered pieces are organised into installations and environments. The act of needlework is taken as a performance, live or registered on video. The technological transformation of this old manual practice adds new layers of communication and allows artists to go beyond its historical and ethnic function. It also enables minority voices to be heard and empowers other visual cultures to be seen in postmodern art. 

Connecting threads and telling stories

We have now learned how and why embroidery is pulled out by the artists. Let us look at what is the result of these experiments and innovations. 

As the embroidery is closely connected with fibre supports and manual craft, artists associate it with textiles and familiarity, which leads them to use it when they want to speak about intimacy, affect, romantic relationships, entanglements, body politics and embodied lives. Ana Teresa Barboza employs needlework to explore our connection with the dress we cannot lose, the skin that protects us and makes the surface of our existence. Feliciano Centurion communicates via stitched poems which encapsulate his state of mind when his body was failing the battle with AIDS. Carlos Arias Vicuña applies embroidery in multiple naked self-portraits to achieve a raw but tender representation of sexuality. In Familia, he stitched a genetic, biological, but also a gendered portrait of his family. The relationship between the son and the parents is disturbing, showing the omnipresent and multiplied father who imprints masculinity on the adolescent boy and the mother- a faceless figure- who nourishes the kid, but who is also in an unequal relationship with her partner. Rick Rodrigues reconstructed the role of home, as the stitches are marks on the fabric, home impresses elements of our identity. Embroidery in these cases, teaches us about fragility, delicacy, and tenderness of human existence.  

Stitching has become a way to construct narratives that challenge the conservative representations and social conditioning of women and men. Men who do the needlework masterfully Carlos Arias Vicuña, Feliciano Centurion, Rick Rodrigues, Fabio Carvalho, Leo Chiachio, Daniel Giannone using only one medium, have provided diverse and unique queer visions of masculinity. They consciously utilise the form to expose the forbidden aspects of life as men in Latin American societies. 

Furthermore, other minority stories have resurfaced and are told in vernacular language. Violeta Parra and Felipe Coaquira work with artisan embroidery styles and make visible the customs, mythologies, and communities of indigenous groups from their respective countries, Chile and Peru. These representations were ignored for a long time, to say the least. At the time, Violeta Parra created her arpilleras, it was an artisan folk expression. They were appreciated more in Europe than in Chile. This was a precarious art. Eccentric, exotic, on the margin of the art scene at that time. That situation has changed lately. In 2021, Felipe Coaquira received the prestigious national award for a painting for his piece Historia de Sonata en el Reino Viringo which depicts a dog of an endemic hairless breed of Peru, which reigns over the people: mestizos, indigenous newcomers. It is an allegory of new social relations where the ancient past and its heirs are appreciated and considered to be a part of the culture that all Peruvians should be proud of. The artwork symbolises the emancipation of many indigenous artists who have strived to be shown in art institutions instead of archaeological, ethnographic, or folklore museums. 

Art of Ana Teresa Barboza also has this connection with the local artisans. However, her approach is more focused on the organically sourced threads that are and dyed by them. She does the stitching herself which “paints” the landscape of Peru. In Five plant dyes from Lambayeque (work conceptualised together with Rafael Freyre), Barboza embroidered on the traditionally weaved textile, produced by craftswoman Elvia Paucar, an image of a rock landscape. She analysed and decomposed this image into the geological strata, then matched them with the colours that make it up. This stratigraphic overview is recreated as a woven tapestry. Next to it is embroidered with sheep wool, coloured with dyes extracted from a plant: Chilca – light blue, Andanga – brown, Qalwinchu – yellow. Raíz – pink, Barba de piedra – terracota. The practice of dyeing with plants has been maintained in many communities in Peru. When we are made to look at the masterly stitched piece, we can unravel its image. The artists add to it that: “To peel its layers and the footprints of time to find the fibres and patterns that have formed. To unravel the image is to dismember it in touch-sensitive fibres. It is to penetrate the skin of the visible surface and understand the manual and bodily processes through which it was formed. To relearn the artisans’ labour means reestablishing contact with these processes. It means understanding there is a footprint left by the body and nature behind that image.” Embroidery and fabric make the whole experience more palpable. By choosing them, the authors were able to trigger physical and embodied relations with the Peruvian culture and nature at the same time through this art piece. 

Besides the symbolic, ornamental, or representation uses of the needlework, abstract and geometric vision are also to be found. Guillermina Baiguera, the Argentinian artist, relies heavily on the intuitive process. She treats embroidery as a meditation and an introspection. Through it, she examines the mental and emotional states. They are then reflected in her art. When they are exhibited, the artist shows two sides of the work, which are generated simultaneously but create different narratives. Another explanation for the visual language is that Baiguera is more interested in the medium than in the message; in other words, she allows the embroidery, threads, and fabrics to lead her. As a result, the created art pieces are like compositions of atonal music, where large voids are punctuated by sudden stitches. In the recent group exhibition in Mexico, “Playing with closed eyes, 100 years of surrealism”, curated by Gabriela Rangel and guest curator Verónica Rossi, Baiguera contributed with the work made of human hair, felt and stitched together with translucent thread “Alimania”. It showed her commitment to an even deeper exploration of psychological processes, here related to grief and dealing with loss and sudden emptiness.

The last significant field where the embroidery is used is to denounce the cruelty and inhumanity of violent deaths caused by internal conflicts, drug wars, gender-based discrimination, and failed state policies. Teresa Margolles and Fábio Carvalho juxtapose this medium, which implies the care counted in long hours of needlework with the blood of the victims. Johanna Calle combines threads with images of the victims of war in Colombia. The trauma, or abject aesthetics are meant to trigger the katharsis of the viewers, who are reminded of the ugly truth. Humans kill other humans. In countries of profound inequalities and social divisions, people are not equal in death. The violence affects whole societies like embroidery penetrates the fabrics. It makes a visible mark. 

Stitching the world anew

This article presents how contemporary artists apply embroidery in innovative and daring ways. The diversity of aesthetics, themes and methodologies is impressive. The investigations and tests of the materials, threads, supports, and techniques allow the introduction of the nonconventional applications of the stitches. In the end, we are able to experience shocking, mind-blowing, stupefying objects. The explorations of the traditions and cultural connotations of embroidery result in appropriations of this medium in entirely different contexts. In effect, historical and gender narrations are challenged. The minority voices and representations are included into the mainstream conversations and circuits. 

written by Alicja Gluszek