Original Research

Affecting Infrastructures: Crafting and Weaving as Alternative Repairs

Fredy Mora-Gámez

Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna
fredy.mora.gamez@univie.ac.at

Eliana Sánchez-Aldana

Faculty of Architecture and Design, Universidad de los Andes
em.sancheza@uniandes.edu.co

Dimitris Papadopoulos

Department of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
dimi2027@gmail.com

Abstract

As two traditional practices performed by rural communities in Colombia, crafting and weaving can be reframed as ontologies that embody alternative material orders and forms of repair. In this context, we explore two specific initiatives: the Crafted Empathy Chair developed by members of campesino social movements in Cauca and Nariño, and Interweaving Material Encounters, a series of collaborative spaces involving women from textile collectives from Chocó, Antioquia, and Bolivar. In the process of exploring these initiatives, we reflect on the role of nonhumans as technologies that allow our interlocutors to share their affect. In addition to discussing strategies for engaging in affective relations when dealing with the aftermath of war violence, we describe how these arrangements affect us as a part of the audience. Thus, we propose the term affecting infrastructure to conceptualize how crafting and weaving can foster everyday spaces and shared grounds for the emergence of emotional engagements as alternative modes of repair.

Keywords

infrastructure, affect, repair, crafting, Columbia, materiality, social movement

Introduction

More than 50 years of armed confrontations involving guerrillas, paramilitary groups, and the Colombian Army have resulted in at least 10 million victims (UARIV 2021). The 2016 signing of a peace accord between Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Ejército Popular (FARC-EP), and the Colombian government was expected to bring an end to the armed conflict. At least, this was one of the narrative outcomes circulated in international media (Brodzinsky 2016; Partlow and Miroff 2016) and local media (Lafuente 2016). However, whether a post-conflict Colombia has been achieved is still part of an ongoing debate, as violence between different armed groups continues to dominate the everyday lives of many people, particularly those who inhabit the rural areas of the country. Our choice of the term post-accord highlights our interest in describing an ongoing situation whose realities exceed official narratives.

In the landscape described above, the question of state intervention in the aftermath of the peace accord is subject to much discussion. These state interventions focus on administrative aspects of reparation (Villa, Londoño Díaz, and Barrera Machado 2015), financial resources for land restitution and compensations for victims (Unruh 2019), reintegration of former combatants (Arboleda Ariza, Prosser-Bravo, and Mora-Gámez 2020), and psychosocial assistance strategies (Vivares Porras, Hernández Zapata, and Cañaveral Castro 2020). One of the regulations that preceded the peace accord is the Law of Victims and Land Restitution (LV), according to which the Colombian State has a legal obligation to both compensate victims (i.e., via restoration of land; monetary compensation; education, health, housing, and employment and income-generation programs) and holistically repair their lives (i.e., provide psychiatric care and recover their dignity, memory, and rights). The LV addresses psychosocial assistance as a crucial aspect of reparation to cope with the emotional aftermath of war and the violence of the armed conflict. Thus, post-accord psychosocial assistance has become a regulation guideline when it comes to reintegrating former combatants. However, institutional psychosocial assistance is often tied to a sliding scale of financial and other forms of compensation (Franco Gamboa 2016; Franco Gamboa and Franco Cian 2020). The result is a predominant form of psychosocial assistance consisting of a series of protocols of emotional recovery used nationwide.

Although the transdisciplinary study of how governmental technologies address the emotional aftermath of war and violence is invaluable and raises critical issues for the theorization of the material politics of state-led projects, we pursue a different line of inquiry. Through participation in social movements and their daily practices in various regions of Colombia, our research has exposed us to material arrangements woven around bottom-up or grassroots strategies, outside of the state’s psychosocial assistance, arranged by our interlocutors to share the multiple consequences of war in their present lives. We engage communities involved in transformative practices of everyday materials, such as crafting and weaving, as practices that create new ways of life (Escobar 2019). Our interest lies in the attempts of our interlocutors to address different emotions stemming from lived experiences of war violence. Affect became the key category that we initially used to address this specific aspect of our ethnographic journey.

However, our understanding of affect does not appeal to representational or internal entities, but to relations configured within groups and objects (Brown and Reavey 2014; Hughes and Mee 2018; Middleton and Brown 2005; Springgay and Truman 2017). These relations occur in spaces that constitute a “shared ground from which subjective states and their attendant feelings and emotions emerge” (Anderson 2009, 78). Given the predominant role of our interlocutors´ material practices in our ethnographic vignettes, we reflect precisely on the role of nonhuman entities in the configuration of these shared grounds of affective relations. In doing so, we reconsider affect as a relational process (Brown and Stenner 2009; Slaby 2019; Von Scheve 2018) embedded in community efforts, collective literacies, social movements, sociomaterial entanglements, and hybrid alliances, which are empirically unpacked in our vignettes. By focusing on material practices such as crafting and weaving, we aim to make more visible the vital (though often hidden) role of affect in social movements and the collective yet individually situated practices of crafting and weaving. Additionally, we focus on the relations around objects and how bodies are affected through touching and being touched (Puig de la Bellacasa 2009). We revisit practices of crafting spaces and textile making as inter-embodied through nearness and being with others, including both humans and nonhumans (Ahmed and Stacey 2001; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).

While we have elsewhere gained some understanding of the transformative potential of crafting and making (Mora-Gámez 2020; Sánchez-Aldana 2022; Sánchez-Aldana et al. 2019), here we emphasize that such practices might also engender alternative ontological conditions of existence (Mora-Gámez 2023a; Tacchetti et al. 2022). We conceive ontology as the capacity of actors (such as groups of humans, members of an animal species, “natural” processes, or certain objects, or some co-action between them) to change the material configuration of their space of existence—that is, “how persons and things could alter from themselves” (Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro 2014, 2). Such an “ontological turn ensued from the encounter between the field of political ecology and the evolving concerns with ontology (objects, things, matter, the real, immanence, process) in postconstructivist social theory” (Escobar 2018, 52). Within this framework our use of the notion of material-ontological transformation is inspired by broader debates in the social sciences, such as anthropology (Blaser 2014; De La Cadena 2010; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro 2014), and science and technology studies (Marres 2009; Mol 2002; Law and Singleton 2005; Pickering 1995; Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). Therefore, we consider crafting and weaving as material encounters and the relations around them as hybrid ontologies between humans and nonhumans that are continuously “in-the-making” or “coming-into-being” (Naji 2009). These relations embody a form of bottom-up, situated transformation that overcomes the excluding forms of reparation promoted by the state. This form of politics is rooted in everyday life (Rancière 1999). Within the context of interest in everyday life, we wonder how affect is mediated by material objects involved in crafting and weaving as transformative practices. We aim to develop a better understanding of the orders emerging from material practices of crafting and weaving, their multiplicity, and their role in the lives of our interlocutors and their audiences in post-accord Colombia.

We begin describing two scenes that demonstrate the relation between crafting/weaving and affect. We initially call these scenes “arrangements” to draw attention to how they consist of human and nonhuman alliances prepared by our interlocutors to address the aftermath of war and violence, among other outcomes. In this epistemic exercise, our descriptions are grounded in a deep appreciation of the situatedness of our interlocutors: women leading communities of peasants and textile makers while embodying multiple conditions of social class, ethnicity, and (forced) migration in the rural areas of Colombia. These generous women who shared their experiences with us have found themselves at the intersection of multiple sources of vulnerability, making their lives particularly and disproportionately impacted by the armed conflict. At the same time, these experiences in the aftermath of violence have also shaped their collective and embodied resistance and repair strategies, as well as the materiality of these strategies. We examine the materiality of those arrangements as entry points to gain a better understanding of the affective and material emerging orders involved. We therefore draw on the notion of infrastructure (Star 1999) to theorize about those emerging relations.

Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita characterize infrastructures as experimental systems that integrate a “multiplicity of disjunctive elements spinning new relations between them” (2017, 615). As the authors explain, these material experiments create ontologies, forms of existence that shape and are shaped by culture, society, and politics. Rather than focusing on large institutional infrastructures (e.g., state or municipal energy, transport, or communication networks or private regional and global supply chains), we focus on mundane, grassroots, less visible spaces that exist beyond the boundaries of state reparation and solidarity (Mora-Gámez 2020). We pay close attention (Savransky and Stengers 2018) to the politics of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) enacted by such arrangements. But more than mere arrangements, crafting and weaving are hereby reframed as practical ontologies producing infrastructures to seek alternatives in dealing with the aftermath of violence. These alternatives also provide collective grounds in which new feelings and emotions emerge in crafters/weavers and their audiences, including ourselves. Therefore, we propose the term affecting infrastructures to conceptualize how crafting and weaving enact spaces in which relational and shared grounds for the emergence of feelings and emotions also become part of their sociomaterial achievements.

Our research presents multi-sited ethnographic experiences connected by the common thread of the Colombian armed conflict during post-accord times, involving interlocutors from different rural regions of the country. Drawing on George E. Marcus (1995, 2012), we establish connections between these experiences by following objects, people, practices, and stories. Alongside our methodology of assemblage ethnography, we incorporate the concept of practice-led research, which emphasizes the process of making, rather than the result (Candy, Edmods and Vear 2021; Groth, Mäkelä, and Seitamaa-Hakkarainen 2015). We bring together ethnographic inputs from our work as distinct and interconnected sites, where material transformations give rise to encounters that foster the co-acknowledgment of our experience (Das 1996).

Our ethnographic recollections include the Empathy Chair, an initiative from peasant social movements in Cauca and Nariño, and Interweaving Material Encounters (IME), a series of spaces with women from textile collectives who are reconstructing their lives and communities (González Arango 2014) from Chocó, Antioquia, and Bolivar. These recollections make visible the role of different objects, the achievements of the arrangements, and our experiences together with our interlocutors. In doing so, we describe how the impact of infrastructures provides alternative spaces to address some aspects of the vast aftermath of war. We reflect on the possibilities and limitations of theorizing the described arrangements as infrastructures. Finally, we discuss what affecting infrastructures might do for the arrangements that we and our interlocutors follow within the landscape of post-accord Colombia.

The Crafted Empathy Chair

It is still early in the morning on the first day of a Feria Campesina (Peasant Fair ), and Lucía has already installed an arrangement consisting of wooden cubicles, chairs, audio systems, and headphones in the main square of Pasto, a city in the southwest of the country. Lucía has crafted these cubicles together with members of her campesino movement (see Figure 1). Although I (Fredy) have participated in the design of other stands, I cannot yet understand what is happening in this stand, so I decide to engage with it. After placing myself inside the cubicle, Lucía hands me a pair of headphones to wear while I look at her sitting in front of me. Our eye contact is the foundation of the encounter. The audio account consists of her detailed narration about what happened on her farm several years ago. Its contents are powerfully moving, and I picture her in the situation described by the audio. She lived there with her partner and their three children until paramilitary groups came to her farm requesting food and money. Lucía explains in the audio account how scared she was of providing anything for them since, most likely, guerrilla militants would find out and come after her and her family for collaborating with the enemy. It was an impossible decision. The Lucía in the audio keeps telling her story, while the Lucía sitting in front of me maintains eye contact.

The uninvited guests on Lucía´s farm dispossessed her of her house and killed her partner and two of her daughters, filling her life with pain, anger, and fear. The atrocities I listen to, years later, are inevitably part of my present recollection of Lucía´s story. I witness how she expresses anger and pain while sitting in front of me. Participating in this arrangement permitted my empathy for her and embodiment of emotions, as well, in a way that is not limited by time. I embody Lucía’s feelings while I narrate her encounter in these paragraphs. By exceeding temporality, Lucía´s story makes even more resonant the similar ones I (we) have come across over the years in Colombia and Greece. These stories are part of other research projects on the materiality of registration procedures of victims of the armed conflict (Mora-Gámez 2023b) and alternative forms of solidarity developed by social movements. Lucía’s vivid narration reminds me of the hundreds of families in similar situations leading up to and during the time of writing. Post-conflict is an inaccurate term quite proudly presented in international reports and negotiations, but it is deeply complicated by the ongoing violence in Colombia, even during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine, when social leaders like Lucía were easily targeted by hitmen and paramilitary groups. Although I am a Colombian national, my situatedness has never been violently pierced by armed conflict. Despite this power imbalance (Alcalde 2007), as someone inhabiting spaces of privilege enacted by my gender and the opportunity to study abroad in an English-speaking country, I now also inhabit a space in the convergence of all Lucía’s emotions and memories. Lucía’s pain, anger, and despair trigger my profound compassion for the Colombia of the past and the present. This convergence site is where reciprocity is transformed and enacted. Lucía’s embodied affect, displayed in the assemblage audio–chairs–people, is now part of an affecting arrangement, a material world (Jensen and Morita 2017) reaching out for my empathy and humanity. My affect is shaped by a more-than-human staging.

Figure 1. The Crafted Empathy Chair displayed at the Feria Campesina. Credit: Fredy Mora-Gámez.

Back in the stand, crafted spaces displayed in a public space become alliances between human and nonhuman actors, allowing the owners of those stories to share their emotions in our encounters. The audio account continues while I sit in the wooden cubicle; the message concludes, “I am from a Red Zone , but I am not a militant, I am just a campesina.” After removing the headphones, Lucía asks me if I want to be hugged, and I gladly accept. Her embrace is a reminder for my body that the pain and anger that I just imagined, felt, and visualized is also embodied by the person in front of me. The feeling induces a transformation that exceeds the scope of words, while involving a multiplicity of emotions, thereby piercing my position as a Colombian, researcher, man, father, son, and a child of migrants. Afterwards, Lucía finalizes our encounter by saying, “Thanks for sharing my story.” Then she invites me to stay all day on the stand and help distribute headphones to the participants.

People initially participate in the arrangement without a clear understanding of its purpose. Sometimes, the person in front of them is not the same person who is narrating the audio. However, Lucía has been careful to choose individuals from her campesino movement collective who at least match the age and gender of the narrator, to preserve the credibility of the story. After the audio account is over, some participants cry, others thank the person in front of them, and most of them express their sorrow for the story. Lucía explains how, after crafting the cubicles, she collected audio accounts from eight participants and engaged in different negotiations with civil servants, which led to the municipality providing computers and headphones for the stand. Lucía explains, “The audio accounts themselves were important, but the chairs, headphones, and the person in front of you make it more intense and effective.” The stand she was curating was part of the aforementioned Feria Campesina organized by leaders of campesino movements in the region.

As leader of one of campesino movements of Nariño, Lucía is participating in the fair in Pasto. Other movements had welcomed me to their communities three months ago, almost coinciding with the period of crafting chairs and cubicles for Lucía’s stand and all the other stands at the fair. Some of those campesino movements were recently recognized as Collective Subjects of Reparation by the Colombian State, and the members of these movements used some of their compensation for the materials to craft the stands, whereas others were not interested in this kind of official recognition and compensation.

When asked about the purpose of the crafted setup, Lucía explains that one of the main challenges faced in a Red Zone is the social stigma that comes with it. Lucía and other leaders noticed how young adults from their communities are unable to find jobs when moving to the city because employers believe that they must be guerrilla or paramilitary combatants, or that they have inevitably engaged in the illicit cultivation of coca. The purpose of the crafted space is to share their stories; in Lucía’s words, “When people feel your story, they stop labeling you.” Throughout our conversations, the “Crafted Empathy Chair” emerges as a suitable name for the arrangement. In my elaboration of it as a crafted object, the Crafted Empathy Chair (CEC) addresses what Steven Brown (2016), drawing on Elaine Scarry, argues about artifacts being a medium that allows human beings to “grant each other access to their inner feelings” (Scarry 1987, 37). It is not a single object; it is an arrangement that unmakes the accounts of those engaging as audiences, in order to make new relations based on attention and empathy. My elaboration as participant, the realization of my position of privilege, the intervention on social imaginaries of participants about campesinos from Red Zones, and the transformations triggered by the words you now read about the CEC are only some of the multiple effects produced by such translations. The CEC embeds materials that “enable the movement of other matter” (Larkin 2013, 329), thereby producing affective orders that redistribute agency (Jensen and Winthereik 2013) and exceed common governmental infrastructures of reparation and psychosocial assistance.

As a co-decided but primarily idiosyncratic term mentioned by the crafters of the CEC, empathy is an outcome of the arrangement, in which a collective of people communicates their experiences of pain and suffering to new audiences. The CEC enacts new forms of “attunement” (Choy 2018; Davies 2021), allowing those who have not experienced the consequences of war to partially grasp elusive aspects of the lives of those who have directly suffered from war-related violence. The articulation of the messages in the CEC do not appeal exclusively to rationality; they seek to trigger a multiplicity of responses by combining audio, narrative, and oftentimes the very bodies of those narrators. The orders emerging from arrangements like the CEC, its infrastructural orders, create a sense of “immersion” (Paterson 2006) that is inhabited through the skin (Ahmed and Stacey 2001). These infrastructures, as ontological orders (Larkin 2013), offer alternative ways of sharing and understanding the aftermath of violence overflowing the reparation strategies offered by the Colombian State (Mora-Gámez 2020, 2023b). The former orders open shared grounds for relational affect and attunement, while the latter strategies focus on the production of indicators, the circulation of expert knowledge, and the consolidation of an official narrative of the armed conflict.

We described the experience of engaging as an audience with the CEC, an arrangement drawing on affective relations as part of its infrastructural material base. Initiatives like the CEC are not isolated efforts, and the multiplicity of effects extends beyond the locality of installment. In the next section, we describe another material practice and what it entails for its participants, while we reflect more deeply on the transformative and material mediations involved.

Interweaving Material Encounters

Sitting in front of the loom, dealing with a rigid set of parallel threads (the warp), I (Eliana) pass a set of cotton threads perpendicularly over and over again to form the weft. The act of interweaving becomes a transformative experience. I immerse myself in the movement of my hands, controlling the thread, letting it pass between my fingertips. I am a designer, a weaver for whom textile making has transformed into the construction of a place to stay. Weaving movements become to me what Kabir, the Indian mystic, poet, and weaver called simran: a silent repetition of a mantra that leads to inner reflection and spiritual liberation (Bean 2016). Interweaving the threads turns into a form of meditation, a way to stop thinking of the future or the past and instead to focus on the present. And, by weaving, I also see myself in other women who have experienced similar pains.

My partner died in 2018. In the aftermath, it was hard to focus on anything but his absence and my grief. I could feel the pain in my body; on my chest, I felt a pressure that made it difficult to breathe, and the sadness in my eyes was so heavy that I wanted to keep them closed. Likewise, the anger in my hands made them tense and tight. The materiality of the emotions in my body afforded me the certainty of grief (Scarry 1987), along with the opportunity to know that what was happening was real. The loss of my partner also led to unpleasant and chaotic places. My encounter with the loom and the threads was a jump from chaos to a principle of order within chaos. The rhythmic sounds and movements of the loom frames, as threads that pass through and transform into cloth, allowed me to stay awake and centered; it was not an escape, but rather a way to peacefully remain within my emotions (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012). Sitting in front of my loom, “we” (loom, threads, needles, cloth, me) entered into an inter-embodied (Merleau-Ponty 1968) movement that not only produced a place to inhabit but became the place itself.

I am also a researcher (and back then, a member of the collective Artesanal Tecnológica) and I have investigated textile practices. But although our work passed through and came from our bodies, what we studied was embodied in other bodies, not ours, not mine. One year before my partner’s death in October 2018, I became part of the transdisciplinary team working on the project Mending the New: A Framework for Reconciliation through Testimonial Digital Textiles in the Transition to Post-Conflict Rural Colombia. This project aimed to explore alternative understandings of reconciliation through the intersection of textile crafting and its encounter with digital materialities. To achieve this, we worked with four textile collectives of women who used their textile pieces to share stories of the Colombian armed conflict, as well as their own pain. Through their tapestries, these women have denounced their claims against impunity in public spheres (Ahmed 2014), and in addition they have dealt with their separate griefs behind closed doors (González Arango 2014).

In September 2019, as part of our activities, we organized a gathering called Digital Minga. After one year of working together remotely, four women from the collective Tejedoras por la memoria (Sonsón Antioquia), six women from Artesanías Guayacán (Bojayá, Chocó), ten women and one man from Artesanías Choibá (Quibdó, Chocó), three women from Mujeres tejiendo sueños y sabores de paz (Mampuján, Bolivar), and we members of the Mending the New team, met in Quibdó. This was the first time during the project that the women from the four collectives had met physically. And, for me, it was the first time I had seen them since my partner’s death. I knew meeting them would be different; after all, we now had something in common: the loss of a loved one. Now, I could see my pain in the women from whom the conflict had taken their partners. Something had changed, and with it, the way I related to them, their stories (Ahmed 2014) and their grief. However, I acknowledge the power asymmetries present in this encounter, the inequalities based on race, and the class differences between me and these women of the collectives. My story has nothing to do with the Colombian armed conflict; we have a researcher–participant relationship, I work in the academic world, and my role was as a partial insider attached to an uneven distribution of power (Alcalde 2007).

Figure 2: The male doll in my personal altar next to a crochet heart that I knitted. A plant, a cup of water, a candle, a crocheted heart and a small male doll with red pants and purple top. Credit Eliana Sánchez-Aldana

I was particularly close with the women of Sonsón’s textile collective. We met in 2016 while I was working on another project. At that time, textile-as-language was what made us alike; we could “talk textile,” but now we shared another embodied language: the language of grief. Luz Dary, a woman from Sonsón, knew about the death of my partner and wanted to see me. I was nervous: those were not good times for me, and my emotions were thoroughly tangled. I was happy to see these women again—after all, this was the reason I decided to travel in the first place—but I was not at emotional strength. When we met, we said nothing for a while; we looked directly and silently into each other’s eyes, and in this silence we touched each other with our eyes (Ahmed and Stacey 2001). And then Luz Dary hugged me, and we needed no words to know what we were talking about: a hug could say more about the unspeakable dimensions (Aranguren Romero 2008) of pain. Later, in a workshop led by Sonsón’s textile collective to make worry dolls, Luz Dary made for me a male doll with red trousers and a purple top (Figure 2). Worry dolls are small handmade dolls from Guatemala and Mexico, crafted as a remedy for worry. The custom says that whoever needs their favors must tell the dolls about the worry and place the doll under one’s pillow so that it removes the worry during the night. For me, the doll represented an image of a body that was no longer with me: an absent presence. This presence of absence served as a reminder of something that was not physically present but was still in me (Didi-Huberman 2009). For Luz Dary, an emotion tailored in the form of a small doll was her way to remember her own grief and connect that grief with me. Her husband was murdered in the Colombian conflict. She had embroidered the story of her husband to reclaim justice. A deliberate practice, which through repetition of the stitches, formed a handmade materiality that is written, that can be read, that allows one to talk with oneself, and that brings others into conversation.

The next day, each of the four extilee collectives showcased the textile pieces crafted as part of the Mending the New project. Women from Artesanías Choibá presented a collection of skirts made by and for each of their textile collective members. Wearing these garments, each of them entered the room telling the story of how they became textile makers, each piece, and its path to creation. The first woman (Maritza) to present told us that she was not a skilled knitter, but rather a very slow one. To make her skirt, she used a thread that the collective leader had gifted her one year earlier. Although she did not finish knitting, she created the skirt exactly as she wanted. “She designed it,” remarked another of the collective members. The owner of the first skirt continued telling us what textile crafting meant to her: “Knitting and embroidering really helps you concentrate on what you are doing and forget about the past.” The second woman came into the room, introduced herself, and told us how much she loves and enjoys knitting. Not only had textile crafting become a source of income to support her family and her studies, but it also became her way to be a part of something, in this case the Artesanías Choibá collective, after her aunt passed away.

A third woman took center stage and shared the story of her family’s experience with displacement, the deep sadness they endured, and their unmet needs. She said that she felt as if she was not part of her own community; she felt unrooted. However, responding to the call of the leader of the collective, she learned to knit; in becoming part of something, now she felt that she belonged to Artesanías Choibá.

The first textile piece that this third woman made was a hand-knit blouse, through which she found therapy to find a way through the violence and the forceful abandonment of her community. Her first textile piece made her realize she was capable of making garments, she felt she was good at it, and she also found a way of living. The end product of knitting was not just the physically finished object, but also the possibility of coming-into-being (Naji 2009) of new opportunities, while she transformed a thread into something else entirely. Knitting for this woman became a place to be and an object to embody a change in her life. As her first garment took the shape she gave it, her thoughts also took on a new shape during the act of knitting (Ahmed 2014).

Every presented skirt/story was unique. The stitches were chosen by their knitters and owners. These owners wore their clothing pieces to present themselves and their past; their bodies were now intertwined with the textiles, and their stories about the making of each garment were textile-crafted presentations of their life stories. This act of wearing their creations was a recognition of what they are, of how their knitted pieces refer to their own body, of how the body was present while they knitted and were thinking about wearing what they were making. Their subjectivity could embody something by knitting a materiality made for those subjectivities. In being worn, the knitted garments transformed the wearer/creator and their subjectivity (Saez Tajafuerce 2014). Textile making is no longer a metaphor that explains their life. It is a concrete material action that transforms them (Sánchez-Aldana 2022). As Myriem Naji (2009) mentions, the making ensemble shapes its participants—human bodies and subjectivities, textile materials and tools—they become something new, different. A new way of being, as a collective coming-into-being. At that very moment, I could only stand back and admire what they had made; I heard their stories and somehow connected with them. Only later did it really make sense.

Sitting in front of my loom, I begin to weave a new piece of cloth. It has been four months since our meeting in Quibdó. Faced with a series of meticulously chosen parallel threads, blue and white cotton, with hints of red, I resume weaving. As part of a personal exploration of a new weaving technique, a Japanese weaving philosophy known as Saori, I was asked to weave a garment. According to my master, you cannot weave in the Saori tradition if you do not wear what you weave. To learn more, I traveled to Japan to visit Saorinomori, a weaving school based in Osaka. Saori is a style of hand weaving in which “there are no samples to follow, and there are no mistakes…Weavers just weave what they want to with complete freedom and creativity…Saori become more than simply tools for creative expression but also tools for self-discovery and self-innovation” (Saori 2016). It was this definition that compelled me to go to Japan. At first, I refused to weave a textile piece to make it into a garment, but over time I learned from seeing that, for all the women who worked with me at the school, having something woven by myself was essential to becoming part of the group. According to Saori philosophy, it is through weaving, making, and wearing our own one-of-a-kind clothes, and generously sharing together, that we realize our uniqueness while also seeing our role in a collective humanity and, by extension, the ability to express ourselves. So I decided to weave a skirt (Figure 3). It was the first time I had woven a piece for myself; it was the first time that I had to recognize my body measurements and shape. I was not only learning the new technique; I was knowing my own body through the act of making. I was now a weaver, with a body. At that moment, I remembered the stories about the skirts.

Figure 3: My skirt on me. Right – up: The loom while I was weaving the piece. Right – down the cloth finished before becoming a skirt. Credit: Eliana Sánchez-Aldana.

In the act of weaving and wearing, I was returning to myself, looking at myself, and remaking what had been damaged. I could see consciously that I could take better care of myself with an unedited version of myself. While weaving, I doubted many times about size, colors, and even the garment itself. I could have quit, but I didn’t. I completed the cloth, then I tailored my skirt. It is the first garment I made, and it was for me. The pain of my loss had broken me. I took my past and present and fashioned something new out of both. The death of my partner was the “weapon,” as Scarry could call it, that unmade me. My weapon is not and will never be the same as the weapons that unmade women from Sonsón, Quibdó, Bojayá and Mampuján—those were real weapons part of the Colombian armed conflict. But I and my body understood that weaving for me (and knitting for them) was the tool to remake ourselves. Textile work helps me to stay in the moment, to embrace weaving by engaging with it (Mann 2018), to stay within the materiality of weaving and within a subjectivity that I remake through my corporeality (Foster 1996). From the materiality of my body and the fabric, from the pain of the past, it became possible to establish a connection and attunement (Davies 2021; Mora-Gámez and Davies 2023) with the stories of the women of Artesanías Choibá. Our shared ground was my and their individual and collective bodies, the places from which I and they weaved the garments and our emotions. Our past was the foundation that held us, the infrastructure basis by which we could continue to pursue and seek alternative perspectives. A textile choreography of making a skirt brought other things into action (Marttila and Botero 2017): our pains, our stories, our bodies. The crafting of textile garments was an action of meaning making that helped us to understand and cope with reality. The process affected the bodies that made the garments. The weave kept us in a place where, while the pain did not disappear, I (we) could see that pain in alternate ways. We were interweaving our own encounters.

The CEC and IME constitute a practical ontology, enacting spaces of common ground and shared emotion. Separately, the CEC and the IME might seem like isolated efforts to address the aftermath of violence and loss. However, despite their separate locations, their shared outcomes converge in our collective experiences, in the relations they foster, the exchanges they mediate, and the attunements they ignite among people with similar or even unrelated experiences. Chairs, cubicles, thread, bodies, looms, textiles, and stories manifest themselves as spaces in which relational and shared emotional grounds become crucial. As affecting infrastructures, the grounds enacted by the CEC and IME are therefore interconnected in their outcomes and the affect relations they embed, permit, and communicate. An additional crucial question is how the enactment of these spaces by affecting infrastructures is shaped by the situatedness of various audiences, including the researchers themselves.

Stitches of Justice and Generosity

During the final day of the Mending Peace: Imagining Reconciliation event in September 2019, I (Dimitris) received an unexpected gift: a small piece of embroidery with words from a poem stitched on white cloth with a blue knitting border (Figure 4). I participated in this meeting not as a researcher aiming to do fieldwork but as a member of a team involved in setting up the project—a project that was very important for me because of its deep commitment to everyday social transformation in midst of a devasting conflict. Soon after arriving at the meeting, I felt that this encounter was activating many previous experiences that I associate with this commitment. I felt a connection that was rooted in the life of my grandparents and parents in resistance to the German occupation in Greece during World War II. And later to the experience of political struggle and displacement during the civil war and in the many dark years that followed. It connected also to the many stories of escape that I have heard from many transmigrants (and as a migrant myself) while doing militant research and border activism in the field of transnational mobility. We have written about these stories (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2007; Papadopoulos Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008) and how they become more than just single stories and instead an imperceptible communal space that facilitates those who try to reconstruct life after war, displacement, or long and often exhausting periods of mobility. And yet despite all these connections, this gift made me rethink these experiences from a different perspective. As a white male academic based at that time in the UK, I was approaching the work of the event through a framework of conflict, displacement, discrimination, resistance, insurgency, and liberation mainly grounded within European political movements. I slowly started exploring the meaning of all these experiences and the ways we theorized them through the lens of all these powerful moments of community making though crafting and weaving that were happening in the meeting in Quibdó. And the gift became what a true gift often is, something that touches and transforms its recipients.

Figure 4: Embroidery with poem on presentation panel at the Mending Peace: Imagining Reconciliation event in September 2019. Credit: Dimitris Papadopoulos

In previous work we called “infrastructures of connectivity” (see Papadopoulos 2018; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013) all the technological means, affective interdependences, practical logistics, and material resources that support people who try to establish new livelihoods and new ways of existence due to displacement, war, or migration. The event Mending Peace: Imagining Reconciliation was itself a transient connectivity infrastructure that brought together women from several textile and sewing collectives from all over Colombia, women who had never met each other before. The event was about sharing and commoning experience: exchanging ways of sewing; sharing memories and pains; showing embroidered pieces, dolls, and tapestries; sewing together in silence; being together in moments of mourning and imagining; readjusting the gaze by being in a different space; exploring opportunities to learn together and give to each other. I sense that the gift I received was an invitation to pause, listen, share, multiply, and sustain such an infrastructure of connectivity emerging through the communal textile crafting practices of these women’s collectives.

The embroidered piece bears the words, “Choibá atrateño. Selva. Fuerza. Vida. Negrura. Mi Amor y mi Ternura” (Atrato river tree. Rainforest. Strength. Life. Blackness. My love and tenderness). The words are from a longer poem by Padre Gonzalo de la Torre, and they encapsulate the postcolonial, rural, and more-than-human making of the life of the community. This predominantly Afro-Colombian community, descended from slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa by European colonizers in the sixteenth century, was displaced to the city of Quibdó, but prior to this displacement they lived as campesinos in villages within the rainforests and wetlands of the Atrato River and its tributaries, all of which were often devastated by armed violence.

The words of Gonzalo’s poem also capture much of what this encounter in Quibdó was about. The gift intertwines crafting, sewing, embroidering, and textile making with the navigation through, negotiation with, and repair of the violence of armed conflict by creating a larger collective that attempts to support alternative lifeworlds of existence. And despite that these alternative lifeworlds of existence are often complicated by new racial inequalities, new discriminations in the places where these women moved after they were forced to leave their homes, social and economic hardship, they offer a way to address the question of justice in a profoundly unjust world. The gift, apart from all its other wonderful powers, also came to epitomize this quest for justice. It told me that every story of displacement is incomplete without a very material practice for justice.

The gift is not only a material object—the result of complex practices sustained through time and incorporating the knowledges, materials, and skills that belong to this collective—but also a text and a message. This is not only because it is embroidered with a verse from a significant poem that captures much of the racial, ecological, and cultural sensibilities of the region (Tacchetti et al. 2022); it is also because the gift speaks in itself (though its specific material presence) about the conditions of its making as the outcome of women getting together in the aftermath of immense violence to create a supportive community that can sustain itself through self-organized work and self-determination. The piece itself is a text of what it means to make and re-create life during and after displacement due to the armed conflict. As an object, it embodies justice by invoking the damage done, by stating the need for reparation, and by attempting to establish more just conditions of existence for those who have suffered from the armed conflict.

What unifies all these aspects of the gift—the materiality, the textuality, the practices, and the social implications of its existence as a present, an invitation, or an instrument of justice—is its inherent generosity. This generosity is born from intersectional struggles related to gender, class, race, and migration status in rural areas of Colombia. The gift—together of course with so many more artifacts, tapestries, embroideries, dolls, baskets, all weaved and crafted in these women’s collectives—enacts the creation of an alternative infrastructure that allows communities to maintain and repair their forms of life in conditions where war violence is still prevalent. The generosity inherent in the gift lies in its ability to link people, practices, and objects together with the past and present of different alternative forms of existence. These existences, the places where friends and family live, the places where other similar crafting communities live, are mobilized affectively in order to offer in a modest and humble way a space for remaking life, for imagining a future after harm, and for linking to similar experiences of other people in similar circumstances. And so the gift was given to me and I have to ask again and again how I can change my own practices in order to be able to contribute to sustain and amplify these infrastructures of connectivity and these practices of justice that are so subtly captured in the stiches of this embroidery.

CEC and IME as Affecting Infrastructures

“Grandma, how do you deal with pain?”

“With your hands, dear. When you do it with your mind, the pain harden even more rather than relieving yourself.”

“With your hands, grandma?”

“Yes, yes. Our hands are the antennae of our soul. When you move them by sewing, cooking, painting, touching the earth or sinking it into the earth, they send signals of caring to the deepest part of you and your soul calms down.” …

“My hands grandma...how long haven’t I used them like that!”

“Move them my girl, start creating with them and everything in you will move. The pain will not pass away. But it will be the best masterpiece. And it won’t hurt anymore. Because you managed to embroider your essence.”
—Elana Barnabé, “Embroider Your Essence”

According to Brian Larkin, infrastructures are “objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate, and when they do so they operate as systems” (Larkin 2013, 329). Crafting and weaving/knitting involve “matter that enable the movement of other matter” (329). Their ontology “lies in the fact that they are things and the relation between things” (329). Thus, the CEC and IME encompass not only the chairs and weaving/knitting materials but also the connections between those objects, the affect relations they provoke, and the transformations they trigger. As Larkin (2013) states, infrastructures create affective relations and political imaginaries (Sneath 2009) that can be analyzed in terms of symbols, myths, or fantasies (Barker 2005). Hence, the politics enacted by the CEC and IEM also involves nonhumans. Although our understanding of these infrastructures is based on their role in the affect relations they produce, we do not seek to reproduce a notion of infrastructure that focuses on poetics as premised on a humanist orientation. Instead, we acknowledge the embeddedness of affect as an outcome of encounters with nonhuman others. Therefore, we take distance from a human-centered orientation by suggesting that such affective reconfiguration is shaped relationally with nonhuman others.

As Susan Leigh Star explains, infrastructure does not grow de novo; instead, it builds on an installed material base “inherit[ing] strengths and limitations of that base” (1999, 382). The CEC utilizes materials such as wood, paint, and audio systems. Meanwhile, the IEM relies on fabric, thread, and needles, among other materials. The CEC and the IEM are infrastructures that emerge from the bottom up in the interstices of social action and more-than-human relationality, aiming to restore projects of social justice and reparation in order to sustain livable worlds. In addition to wood and fabric, the installed base of the arrangements we have presented is also constituted by the stories, memories, and visual materializations used to share emotions and create common grounds for attunements. A starting point that also becomes part of the material basis for this kind of infrastructures is the affect shared by its participants embedded in stories, audios, memories in the forms of audios, embroideries, and so on.

As for properties as infrastructures (Star 1999), the CEC and IME are embedded in other infrastructural arrangements, and they do not need to be assembled for each task. This interconnectedness with other infrastructures grants them stability over time. For example, the CEC is still displayed in numerous main squares and is used by campesino(e) movements in versions different from other audio accounts and stories. Mobility is one of the most evident features of such affecting infrastructures, inasmuch as they are easily moveable between cities, towns, and other sites.

Crafting and weaving/knitting, as shared practices and forms of literacy, familiarize new participants with the CEC and IME. These practices follow implicit and explicit conventions, such as emphasizing the emotions conveyed by the narrators in the audios, the significance of visual contact in the CEC, the diverse textile-making techniques, and the selection of fabrics and materials. These standards are learned through practice. Their configuration and transformations have required constant efforts from campesino(e) movements and weavers/knitters’ collectives. Similarly, as practical ontologies, the CEC and IME are infrastructures whose material politics exceeds governmental infrastructures of reparation and psychosocial assistance.

In our stories, crafting spaces and textile making, as transformative ontological practices, provide alternatives for dealing with and sharing the affective aftermath of war violence. But mapping the multiple material outcomes of the CEC and the IME as infrastructures is a task that exceeds the purpose of these paragraphs and our overall research projects. Yet we feel compelled to speculate about their affective outcomes and the potential interconnectedness of them in the landscape of post-accord Colombia. An important question becomes important in this speculation: What is gained by reframing the CEC and IME as affecting infrastructures?

Our use of this term is twofold: on the one hand, it endows us to conceptualize how crafting and weaving enact spaces in which relational and shared grounds for the emergence of feelings and emotions also become part of their sociomaterial achievements. In these spaces, crafting and weaving affect different audiences. Rather than entering the ethnographic scene with a predefined identity, political standpoint, or coherent structural ontology, as audience we focused on the material conditions and tactile possibilities through which our interlocutors came into being with us and others (Naji 2009). We made an effort to “re-exist” (Albán Achinte 2017) with their experiences while being attentive to our interlocutors’ multiple struggles embedded in their practices of crafting/knitting. These struggles, pierced by the embodied situations of class, gender, ethnicity, and migration, create specific material conditions and possibilities to become common nodal points that span across audiences (including us as researchers) and places.

On the other hand, reframing initiatives like the CEC and the IEM as affecting infrastructures shifts our attention to the imperceptibility of their affective outcomes. Whereas the broad discussions about infrastructures point out how they become visible upon their own breakdown, in the case of affecting infrastructures, visibility is instead a slow achievement resulting from gradual investments to overcome, mend, and repair the emotional wounds of war violence through mundane arrangements. Despite the convergence of multiple forms of vulnerabilities impacting the lives of our interlocutors, their sociomaterial responses constitute alternative and intimate repairs that are not visible at large scales. Instead, our interlocutors connect and amplify their collective voices, they create an alternative support infrastructure that restores justice, step by step, through everyday material practice. Such alternative infrastructures do not facilitate the movement of goods, standardized knowledge or services as large, instituted infrastructures do; rather, these infrastructures operate through affect, embodied knowledge, mundane materialities, and transversal practices to acknowledge and sustain other ways of being.

Beyond the general discussion of infrastructures within the ontological context, here we use the term infrastructure in a very specific way to denote the specific constraints and possibilities for affecting both immediate distant conditions of everyday existence. Affecting infrastructures are generative of creative spaces that offer alternative repairs amid the ruptures and crisis resulting from the ongoing infrastructural breakdown of peace as a state project in post-accord Colombia. Affecting infrastructures open new forms of engagement for communities and audiences while sometimes challenging common channels of participation and recognition. Therefore, more than merely arranging, the CEC and IEM are infrastructuring repairing orders.

We examined material arrangements crafted by social movements that seek the transformation of social imaginaries about peasants who inhabit Red Zones (the Crafted Empathy Chair) and the elaboration of grief while collectively knitting (Interweaving Material Encounters). Building on our ethnographic material, we have used the term affecting infrastructures to describe how such practical ontologies open shared grounds of emotional attunement while also affecting different audiences. Among the multiplicity of achievements, the collective acknowledgment of emotions and production of diverse audiences are the most salient. Finally, we reflected on alternative repairs as potential outcomes of affecting infrastructures and how their scaling constitutes a material politics of transformation of communities in local and national scenarios such as post-accord Colombia.

What crafting empathy chairs and weaving encounters presented in this paper add to the notion of infrastructure is precisely their affecting features reaching participants and wider audiences with the mediations of materials and the possibility of constituting material forms of emotional attunement and repair. Thus, the CEC and IME, among other ongoing initiatives, are deployed as infrastructures to expand and transform local and national orders from the bottom up. Alternative repairs are then outcomes of affecting infrastructures accomplished through crafting and weaving/knitting practices enacting forms of overcoming, relating to, and otherwise engaging with the aftermath of violence.

Although national reparation projects enjoy more visibility as an infrastructure-state, breakdown and insufficiency leave room for alternative repairs, reaching the audiences of affecting infrastructures. We have outlined a portion of such initiatives of building affecting infrastructures that acknowledge the aftermath of war violence, in which women who are also peasants, forced migrants, and ethnically diverse craft different arrangements that “absorb the blows” of aggression and “hold out the prospect of a world worth attaching to” (Berlant 2016, 414). Through the collective crafting of chairs and weaving encounters as practices that enact shared grounds of emotional attunement in post-accord Colombia, these spaces invoke the damage done by stating the need for reparation and by attempting to establish more just conditions of existence for those embodying the aftermath of war.

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Author Bios

Fredy Mora-Gámez is a researcher at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna (Austria). He is also a senior lecturer at the Division of Gender Studies (TEMA GENDER), Linköping University (Sweden).

Eliana Sánchez-Aldana is a designer, weaver, and feminist from Bogotá. She is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Design of the Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia.

Dimitris Papadopoulos is a Professor of History of Consciousness in the Department of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz