Text, Textile, and Action: Collective Strategies in Latin American Art

Textility, or the relationship of materials and the forces they embody, is a term useful for thinking about how textiles intersect with systems of thought (Ingold 2010). In its contemporary resurgence, fiber art has been increasingly understood in connection with “text,” highlighting its communicative force and operation as a form of language. Textiles, like writing, transmit meaning through material processes, embodied gestures, and collective memory.

The focus of this paper is on the practices of two artist collectives: Pontos de Luta from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Cooperativa Gráfica La Voz de la Mujer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both employ the interplay of fiber and writing to confront persistent restrictions on political, gendered, and identity-based freedoms in their national contexts. Their practices foreground marginalized and disappeared populations, positioning fiber and craft as central to struggles over visibility, testimony, and resistance. These initiatives engage with historical genealogies of clandestine and gendered media in the region, from the arpilleristas in Chile who denounced the dictatorship through their embroidery, and the early feminist print collective in Argentina, La Voz de la Mujer.

By situating these two collectives within a transnational history of politically engaged fiber and print, this paper asks: How might text and textile operate together as resistant forms of language? And how do women-centered collectives mobilize these mediums to generate shared vocabularies of protest and survival?