1 of 14

Material Stories of Healing, Survival, and Dignity in Colombia’s Struggle for Peace:

FORGED TILES,

POISONED RIVER,

AND EMBROIDERED PAÑUELOS

BY TANIA PÉREZ-BUSTOS

2 of 14

How does care inhabit the continuity of violence in Colombia?

3 of 14

The transition towards peace has revealed fragile and violence has increased or maintained in various forms.
This, in turn, has brought particular ways in which civil society has engaged in the crafting of this transition …

4 of 14

Forged Tiles: �Violence that survives care, instrumentalizing it�

First tale...

5 of 14

Left up: women forging the molds.

Left bottom: tiles being melted.

Right up: Tiles located in Fragmentos flor.

Right bottom: Military actor stepping in Fragmentos (armed group unidentified)

6 of 14

How can we prevent the material ways of transforming pain and moving to less violent worlds from instrumentalizing the bodies and histories of those who live daily with the scars of war?

7 of 14

Poisoned river: �Violence that engenders care for the past and the future�

Second tale…

8 of 14

Left: Complete piece made up of embroidered squares with small landscapes and crafts related to the Atrato river. In each square, each participating woman also points out the meaning that the Choibá collective has had for her.

Right: Detail of the complete piece with the poem of the Choibá group.

9 of 14

Imagining the territory, remembering it while it is being embroidered, is a way of signaling its loss and damage. It invites us to think carefully about the transitions of war, to refine our listening to what these crafts narrate and make possible in their creation

10 of 14

Embroidered pañuelos: �Care to struggle with violence

Third tale..

11 of 14

�

Left: Photograph taken by Made in Chocó that circulated in social networks showing the work of the embroiderers of the sewing circle of the Corp-oraloteca.

Bottom: Pañuelos installed at the University of Antioquia in the event My soul is in mourning. What do we lose when a social leader is murdered? July 30, 2019

12 of 14

The embroidered pañuelos and the pañuelos not yet embroidered, connect a national and public problem, which involves many territories and bodies, with our domestic and intimate spaces, through the care that textile crafts require: stitch by stitch we recognize a name, a place, a moment, a community organization, an absence, another absence, another one; a sum of losses that is dimensioned with so many names not yet embroidered.