Fresia y Caupolicán
Fresia y Caupolicán (Fresia and Caupolicán), 1964 – 65
Violeta Parra
Dyed jute fabric with embroidery
Parra was an activist, visual artist and renowned songwriter whose embroidered works are greatly informed by Latin America’s long histories of textile making. This artwork depicts a passage from La Araucana (The Auracaniad), an epic poem from the sixteenth century that narrates the Spanish conquest of Chile, focusing on the Arauco War fought between the Spaniards and the Mapuche people, an Indigenous group in Chile’s Araucanía region. In the passage, Caupolicán, a toqui — the name for Mapuche war leaders — is captured by the Spanish. Upon seeing that he allowed himself to be captured alive, his wife Fresia throws their child at his feet in a fit of rage.
Caupolicán, depicted in blue — a colour of great spiritual importance in Mapuche culture — is chained at the neck and ankles by a Spanish soldier who is depicted in green and black, while seven other soldiers look on. By depicting them in this act of barbarity Parra challenges the colonial notion that the Spanish were a civilising force.*
From the exhibition
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
(February – May 2024)
Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day, and we’re shrouded in them when we die.
What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance? How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?
Since the 1960s, textiles have become increasingly present in artistic practices for subversive ends. This is significant as the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history. Textiles have been considered ‘craft’ in opposition to definitions of ‘fine art’, gendered as feminine and marginalised by scholars and the art market. The 50 international artists in this show challenge these classifications, harnessing the medium to speak powerfully about intimate, everyday stories as well as wider socio-political narratives, teasing out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and the weft. These artists defy traditional expectations of textiles, embracing abstraction or figuration to push the boundaries of the medium. They draw on its material history to reveal ideas relating to gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
Rather than dictating a chronological history of fibre art, the exhibition is organised in thematic dialogues between artists — across both generations and geographies — to explore how artists have embraced textiles to critique or push up against regimes of power. Some artists work alone with solitary, near-meditative practices, while others reflect the shared approach that the medium often invites, working with collaborators in acts of community and solidarity. Spanning intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, these artworks communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, invoking the vital issues embedded in fibre and thread.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken at the Barbican Centre
Fresia y Caupolicán
Fresia y Caupolicán (Fresia and Caupolicán), 1964 – 65
Violeta Parra
Dyed jute fabric with embroidery
Parra was an activist, visual artist and renowned songwriter whose embroidered works are greatly informed by Latin America’s long histories of textile making. This artwork depicts a passage from La Araucana (The Auracaniad), an epic poem from the sixteenth century that narrates the Spanish conquest of Chile, focusing on the Arauco War fought between the Spaniards and the Mapuche people, an Indigenous group in Chile’s Araucanía region. In the passage, Caupolicán, a toqui — the name for Mapuche war leaders — is captured by the Spanish. Upon seeing that he allowed himself to be captured alive, his wife Fresia throws their child at his feet in a fit of rage.
Caupolicán, depicted in blue — a colour of great spiritual importance in Mapuche culture — is chained at the neck and ankles by a Spanish soldier who is depicted in green and black, while seven other soldiers look on. By depicting them in this act of barbarity Parra challenges the colonial notion that the Spanish were a civilising force.*
From the exhibition
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
(February – May 2024)
Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day, and we’re shrouded in them when we die.
What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance? How can textiles unpack, question, unspool, unravel and therefore reimagine the world around us?
Since the 1960s, textiles have become increasingly present in artistic practices for subversive ends. This is significant as the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of Western art history. Textiles have been considered ‘craft’ in opposition to definitions of ‘fine art’, gendered as feminine and marginalised by scholars and the art market. The 50 international artists in this show challenge these classifications, harnessing the medium to speak powerfully about intimate, everyday stories as well as wider socio-political narratives, teasing out these entangled concerns through a stitch, a knot, a braid, through the warp and the weft. These artists defy traditional expectations of textiles, embracing abstraction or figuration to push the boundaries of the medium. They draw on its material history to reveal ideas relating to gender, labour, value, ecology, ancestral knowledge, and histories of oppression, extraction and trade.
Rather than dictating a chronological history of fibre art, the exhibition is organised in thematic dialogues between artists — across both generations and geographies — to explore how artists have embraced textiles to critique or push up against regimes of power. Some artists work alone with solitary, near-meditative practices, while others reflect the shared approach that the medium often invites, working with collaborators in acts of community and solidarity. Spanning intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations, these artworks communicate multi-layered stories about lived experience, invoking the vital issues embedded in fibre and thread.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken at the Barbican Centre