In October 2022, during the beginning of the early planting season, I arrived in Mater Cusco along with my partner Alejandro Bidegaray and my young daughter Amanda Libertad to carry out a collaborative residency with the Warmis of K´acllaraccay. My proposal focused on memory, identity, and territory, approaching textiles as a narrative space. Highlighting the premise of creating from what happens in the encounter and the experience of sharing weaving in the community's daily life, we embarked as a family on this beautiful adventure of delving into all that is woven while weaving.

Textiles not only serve the function of dressing and keeping warm, but also of maintaining a living cultural narrative. In the high Andean valleys, the textile heritage is palpable in every corner; it is hard to think of the Andes without thinking of weaving. The inhabitants of these latitudes often carry the time and space in which they live on their bodies, as clothing. This manifests their identity, embodying through colors and symbols, territory, life, and communal experience, in this social skin that is the textile.

Sometimes there are absences, fractures, and this also tells us the story of a people. Traditional techniques fall into disuse and foreign ones slip through the cracks, becoming part of everyday life. In K´acllaraccay, there are threads, many threads, unlike any other community I have known, but the weaving on the back strap loom seemed somewhat lost and it was digging deep or unraveling, where narratives, gestures, memories, and an intrinsic knowledge emerged like green shoots among the threads, revealing a memory that pulses to remain alive.

K´acllaraccay is a community that blooms among the mountains in the heights of Urubamba, with adobe houses, tile roofs, and wooden balconies, reached by a path after an ascending walk among freshly plowed fields, ropes, and k´acllas, shepherds and sheep, and the embrace of the Apus Wañinmarcca, Verónica, and Chicón that surround the region. It is a 40-minute walk from Mil Centro and the imposing archaeological site of Moray. A first hamlet announces the proximity of the village, loose animals, women with their bundles or keperinas on their backs, and men carrying large tools on their way to their fields welcoming this small and isolated community.

Here resides a group of women weavers and dyers, sixteen unforgettable women with whom, along with my family, I had the wonderful opportunity and immense privilege to live one of the most profound and transformative experiences of my journey as a weaver: Elba, Ceferina, Inés, Gregoria, Modesta, Benita, Nelly, Virginia, Yolanda, Claudia, Purificación, Francisca, Ceferina, Blanca, Ceferina, and also Eva; together they are the Warmis of K´acllaraccay.
Warmi, woman in Quechua, is not merely the name of the collective. Warmi is also used as an adjectival form, a disposition of the woman to do and learn to do. Its opposite is wailaka, used to define a woman who does not know or sometimes lacks the will to learn. But it is also a variable state; a woman can be warmi for one thing, and a little wailaka for another. And that can vary throughout an afternoon or a meeting, causing laughter and also tensions that can open exchanges and new learnings.

Traversed by those variations between warmis and wailakas, through which we rotated throughout our meetings, we learned about weaving, bonds, life stories, and interculturality while we wove a collective piece and a beautiful friendship.

We began by narrating the landscape starting from the colors that the warmis obtain from the plants of the region, according to what the land provides in each season. Together we thought of a color palette that would carry the threads that they spin tirelessly. The agricultural calendar would be our guide. What would make our weaving visible representing the dry season, the wet season, and the blooming of this territory, in three cloths woven with three culturally different but sistered weaving techniques. A square loom for the dry season, a fixed comb adapted to back strap for the rainy season, and finally the back strap loom representing the blossoming of spring, showcasing the revitalization of this native and ancient technique.

At Elba's house, one of the group's references, we gather to share and exchange knowledge. In the center of the patio, there is a pedal loom. It is not a native loom, but it is the one that calls us, the one that brings us together. We are few at first, but quickly the warmis become contagious, and as days go by, they start arriving at Elba’s patio, alternating according to their activities with the flock and the field.

The first exchange was a knot, different ways to tie. Tying and untying, little by little, we also knotted ourselves together around the loom. Milagros, Mila, warmicha, ñañai. The ways of naming me are softening. The weaving finds us, brings us closer; we build a bond through it. Khipu, mini, allwi, laughter, words, silences, glances. We weave and come closer, we weave and recognize ourselves. We do not speak the same language, but we inhabit the world sharing the same language: that of threads and hands. We weave through it a parallel code, a way of being in the world.

All weaving on a loom is produced by the encounter between two parts: warp and weft. Like the threads, we met, approaching, distancing, and coming back together throughout the shared time. Weaving also implies tensions; they are needed to prevent the threads from tangling. Our meeting also had those when we got entangled like threads in the wind. Sometimes understanding arrives out of time, in one time, and often also in a different space. Then we learned to tighten our threads, a little chicha, silence, thoughts, and laughter, and sometimes also tears, realizing that in that tension we were also strengthening ourselves.

Hidden in each weave of our piece is a parallel symbolic weaving laden with feelings and meaning; it is the narrative that recounts our meeting, where we walk together through memory to make way for the wishes and needs of this present and from there look to the future. That textile piece, exposed in Mater, is a path full of seeds from which new weavings are already sprouting, continuing to strengthen the collective work of the Warmis and the revitalization and acknowledgment of a technique closely linked to the Andean world.

I want to thank the entire team at Mater initiative and Mil Centro for their warmth and openness, and especially Verónica Tabja for being a bridge to make this experience possible in the way that it was and how it continues to be as time goes by. I deeply thank my children Pedro and Amanda for accompanying me in my wanderings each in their own way, and my partner Alejandro Bidegaray for the team we were in this immense experience, for his support, commitment, and sensitive view of the meeting that was captured in the photos accompanying these words. And finally, I thank the Warmis for opening the doors to the intimacy of their group, their homes, and their lives and transforming mine forever.

Photos: Alejandro Bidegaray