Book Review
Book Review | Gestos textiles: Un acercamiento material a las etnografías, los cuerpos y los tiempos, by Tania Pérez-Bustos (Editorial Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2021)
School of Bioethics, Universidad Anáhuac México
sandragonzalezsantos@gmail.com
This book begins with a simple, daily, almost insignificant event: the falling of a button. Following this simple event comes sewing back the button onto its shirt. Tania Pérez-Bustos, a Colombian STS feminist anthropologist, sees in this mundane event a pause for reflection, an opportunity for change, a moment of wonder, an encapsulation of the complexity of life. Why did he, the owner of the button, never learn to sew? Why did she learn to sew? Did she? Who taught her? How did she learn? Why does he ask her to do it? Did he ask or did she offer? Sewing back a button can be considered a simple act, yet it is capable of disrupting choreographed daily routines, long-existing habits, even culturally embedded preconceptions. Simple acts, simple gestures, can be transformative: this apparently simple piece of wisdom is what I take from reading Gestos textiles: Un acercamiento material a las etnografías, los cuerpos, y los tiempos. Throughout the book, it becomes patently clear that using gestures to change life is—like creating handmade textiles—an art that takes time, intention, knowledge, repetition, and care.
Gestos textiles results from an ethnographic research project involving textile artists, activists, women, and researchers, many of whom have found in textile work a way of healing the wounds of the violence Colombia has lived for decades as part of its civil conflicts. It is a book about the creation and transmission of embodied knowledge held and shared by and among women, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and researchers. It is a book that explores sewing, weaving, stitching, knitting, patching, and embroidering as acts of political subversion, as enactments of caring, as ways of providing economic and emotional sustenance, as methods for academic research, and as moments for personal reflection.
Throughout the book, Pérez-Bustos braids her experience as an apprentice of textile work, with her ethnographic engagement with collectives of textile workers, with the perspectives of feminist STS scholars, with aspects of the political life of Colombia, with bits of her personal life, with the fabrics, tools, movements, and knowledge of textile making. This plaiting produces a coherent book. Not only does it talk about the rhythm and tempo of textile work, its narrative follows a weaving rhythm as well. This slow poetic pace is an act of resistance against contemporary academia, market logics, and the fast pace of social life governed by those logics, all of which are pushed to produce disposable commodities at a hypervelocity. This book makes you pause and move into a slower tempo, into what she calls a textile time: a non-linear time that is meaningful and existential, which is purview of memories and reveries, a time mythologically considered to be governed by Kairos, who overlooks the circular time of festivities, and not by Kronos, who controls linear time marked by clocks and kept in schedules.
Gestos textiles presents gestures, particularly textile gestures, as arts-based research tools for both exploring and analyzing technology and social movements, tools that are simultaneously political and healing. Gestures are body movements that seek to convey meaning. Pérez-Bustos’s textile gestures are meaningful movements carried out by complex hybrid bodies, made up of threads-hands-fabric-needles-histories-politics-memories that perform acts of world-making. These acts could well be lived without hesitation, quickly forgotten—like sewing back a fallen button—but if we pay attention to them, as Pérez-Bustos does, they reveal the tensions in gender roles, class expectations, economic possibilities, technological knowledges and ignorances, generational relations, intimate negotiations, survival strategies, domestic life, forgotten legacies, and much more. Textile gestures are situated, embodied, and material doings, they are ways of thinking, ways of enunciating, of communicating, and of being in the world. For this book, she selects four textile gestures and poetically explores each one in a different chapter: repeating, undoing, mending, and patching.
We learn to make and to interpret gestures relationally, through observation, experimentation, and trial and error. Textile work is no different: you need to do it to learn it. Departing from the school of ethnography that called for non-participatory observation, Pérez-Bustos chooses to follow the “epistemic requirement” of textile work: to physically engage in learning how to do the different textile techniques as part of her way of understanding the experiences of the communities she was working with. Pérez-Bustos reflects upon this in the first chapter, “Repeat to Learn”:1 it was the embodied act of doing that allowed her to identify how those who practice textile work are able to attend and tie together threads of conversations with threads of thought, with threads of life, with threads of wool.
In this chapter, Pérez-Bustos presents the history of the dechados, exemplars of embroidering stitches practiced since the nineteenth century in the context of women’s religious schooling. She describes in detail some of these textile gestures, highlighting the rhythm and speed of each movement, the type and number of movements, and their cultural meaning. Dechados exhibit a particular mastery and perfection that is acquired through acts of bodily repetition. It is through repetition of specific gestures that the body-mind-fabric-thread creates memories, habits, knowledge, expertise, change, and textiles. To attain mastery and perfection, repetition must include undoing to redo, the subject of the following chapter.
“Undo to Redo”2 is the textile gesture explored in the second chapter. This textile gesture reflects the importance given to perfection, framing mistakes as acts that can be undone—a gesture that implies careful destruction3 and that undoing is also a way of doing. Just like doing, undoing and redoing require knowledge and specific tools. One needs to know how to undo in order to redo in such a way as to hide the traces left behind by the constant doing and undoing. But undoing can also be a specific way of doing, as is the case with the calado, where the pattern is made by removing threads (deshilar). While showing Pérez-Bustos how to undo, the women with whom she learned to do this textile gesture talked about the need to learn to undo relationships in order to build new ones, the need to forget to remember, the need to let go of those who pass to be able to go ahead with those who remain. In this chapter, Pérez-Bustos discusses the effects that industrialization, mechanization, and the global market have had on textile work. For example, she reflects upon what some women mentioned regarding materials: they were used to working with a particular type of loosely woven material (etamine), but it had become difficult to find so they had to change to a more rigid material. Finding the spaces and threads to cut in the new material was much more difficult and time consuming. Regarding the process of automatization, she points out how the machines developed for sewing, weaving, and embroidering—all very important in the process of industrialization and capitalism—produce standardized and homogenized pieces, pieces without a soul, she says. However, she notes, no machine has been designed to undo and then redo; this made me wonder: Are mistakes unique or at least difficult to standardize?
In the third chapter, “Mending as Resistance,”4 Pérez-Bustos explores mending as a textile gesture that seeks to deal with the wear and tear of life through visible stitches, embroidering, and patchwork. Mending is political; you can decide whether to hide the mending or to let it be visible, to hide the scars of life or to wear them on the sleeve. Mending as resistance has the intention of showing where life has left its marks, those of loss and those of gain; of resisting the disposability of matter, of re-signifying fray. Mending requires knowledge of the fabric and the way it is worn; it requires interacting with the materiality and the passing of time in order to strengthen that part of the fabric, making it gain resilience.
In the fourth chapter, “Bringing Together to Compose,”5 the textile gesture is the patchwork and the quilt is the textile work. The stories come from a project called the Traveling Sewing Box, which began in 2015 and involved a number of textile collectives, including Mujeres Tejiendo Sueños, Sabores de paz en Mapuján, Artesanías Guayacán, and Memorias de Sonsón. This project was inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt in the United States. In this case, the project consisted of a box that would travel across Colombia, visiting different collectives of textile activists, who would then send back the textiles they produced. These textiles were telling their particular stories and memories of the civil conflict using their own textile style. The gesture of the project was to bring together different pieces of fabric, diverse textile techniques, an array of personal stories, and the collectives of textile workers from across Colombia. Through the material patchwork, their stories of violence, loss, and remembrance were reconfigured, placed side by side as a way of sharing, remembering, healing, and repairing, as a way of creating a new and very powerful narrative.
In the final chapter, “Dechado of Concepts,”6 the reader will find a revision of four textile gestures that were developed throughout the book: textile crafts, textile ethnography, textile bodies, and textile times. Here the gesture that Pérez-Bustos performs is to tie these textile gestures to the work of other thinkers (e.g., Erin Manning, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Tim Ingold, Luz Gabriela Arango Gaviria, Pascale Molinier, Sara Márquez Gutiérrez, María Puig de la Bella Casa, Donna Haraway, Sarah Pink, Roberta Bacic, Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl, Natalia Quiceno, and Adriana Villamizar). Her knitting of textile and textual gestures is as carefully performed as the rest of the book: concept by concept, page by page, thread by thread.
Gestos textiles is a collection of animated micro-stories that take us through the needle hole down the thread across the fabric and into the lives of women, the theory of academics, and to Pérez-Bustos’s personal story as a textile apprentice. These stories are about the act of mending lives, frayed relationships, torn dreams, and about how to redesign a past in order to weave a better present and future. Textile gestures transform materiality, and by doing so, they transform the lives of those who perform them; they transform their stories, their memories, their views of the future and of themselves.
Notes
1 Repetir para aprender
2 Deshacer para volver a hacer
3 Destruir con cuidado
4 Remendar para resistir
5 Juntar para componer
6 Dechado de conceptos
Author Bio
Sandra P. González-Santos is a feminist STS scholar interested in reproductive and genetic biotechnologies, food systems, and arts-based pedagogies.