This 2019 exhibit taught a new generation of upstate New York community members about the resilience of women during a dark moment in Chilean history. On September 11, 1973, the democratically elected socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a violent coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. The subsequent dictatorship lasted over a decade and a half. The Pinochet dictatorship brutally repressed political dissent and opposition, and targeted its police and military apparatus against its own citizens, leading to a large number of illegally detained, tortured, and “disappeared” victims. The repression under Pinochet inspired the emergence of a strong national human rights movement, which protested the numerous state abuses being committed against Chilean citizens.
Political protest found expression in many different forms, including artistic representations. The Catholic Church’s Vicaría de Solidaridad became a central hub of human rights activity, providing a physical and social space for family members of the disappeared to share their experiences. Based on traditional woven folk art, arpilleras became a key form of communal craft art and protest. Sewn onto a backing of burlap with collected household fabric, the tapestry scenes often depicted images of military repression, popular resilience, and lost loved ones. These political pieces were then smuggled out of Chile to be sold as informative art to educate a larger global public on what was happening under Pinochet’s regime.
The joint St. Lawrence University and SUNY Potsdam sponsored Sewn in Protest exhibit showcased a collection of Chilean arpilleras owned by Philadelphia fair trade pioneer Jubilee Crafts. Fair trade importers like Jubilee Crafts, whose roots lay in the Evangelical Left, bought arpilleras to both provide a living wage to the Chilean women who created them, and also to educate the U.S. public on life under Pinochet. The exhibit was open to members of both university campuses and to the broader upstate New York public, and involved guest keynote speakers like famed Chilean muralist Francisco Letelier, who also worked to create a mural during his visit with undergraduate students. The different programming events and digital humanities website drew a large audience to a renewed viewing of this historical protest art, while helping to educate the public on its meaning and context. Multiple undergraduate classes incorporated digital humanities assignments (like podcasts, digital narratives, digital timelines), the best of which were incorporated into our website, (forgingmemory.org), which included a story map pulled from GIS data collected at key memory sites in Santiago and edited video clips from the oral histories from women who made arpilleras in the 1980s.