When a participant of an (Un-)Stitching Gazes workshop in Medellín reflected that “the peace process concerns us all”, it reflected a difficult social dialogue and change of attitudes, mediated by fabric, needle, and thread.
The 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) brought to an end an armed conflict that had lasted for more than five decades, killed about 220,000 people (81.5% of them civilians), and displaced almost six million. The implementation of the peace agreement has faced many challenges, including continued violence by other armed groups, targeted killings of social leaders and FARC peace signatories, and a wavering political will to implement the more transformative provisions of the peace accords dependent on election results at national, regional, and local levels.
Eight years later, Colombian society continues to be socially and politically polarized. While the conflict affected Colombians in geographical and social locations differently, everyone played a role in its historical dynamics. Despite this, many Colombians still find it difficult to recognise their co-responsibility within these dynamics.
In this kind of situation, how can we approach those considered enemies for so many years and imagine them beyond dominant narratives of violence? How can we encourage a diverse social dialogue towards the realization that, in one way or another, the peace process concerns us all? This is the focus of project (Un-)Stitching Gazes – to enable difficult conversations between Colombians and use the methods of “textile narratives,” stories told through textiles, and “textile resonances,” textiles made in response to those narratives.
In its first phase, the project worked with the communities of San José de León and Llano Grande, two rural villages in the Colombian department of Antioquia, that now host groups of peace signatories. (Un-) Stitching Gazes invited them, their families, their old and new neighbours, their supporters and victims, to tell their preferred stories by means of needle and thread.
The transition process brought with it a number of emotional challenges. In one of the first steps of this process, the FARC laid down their weapons. Adriana remembered how difficult this was for her. “When I started carrying a gun, I knew that this was my defence … my faithful companion. It was very hard for me to turn it in, I cried a lot …. It is a void,” she said.
Yet at the same time, the laying down of arms crucially enabled the eventual emergence of trust between the peace signatories and their new neighbours. As Marleida, a resident of San José de León, explained, “Here, we’re shaking hands for the first time. After so much fear, we came and shook hands, and we welcomed them to our area, so that we can live together and build peace in the village. He lay down his weapon to shake hands with us.”
“Shaking hands,” Marleida, 2019, San José de León (photo: Colectivo (Des)tejiendo Miradas archive).
Some of the embroideries directly addressed the dominant narratives about the demobilised FARC combatants as terrorists, delinquents, or even non-human monsters. Jhonatan, a peace signatory living in Llano Grande, chose to embroider an anatomical heart to rehumanise FARC peace signatories. “I always hear that guerrillas are not human beings, that we are demons, they portray us as monsters. I chose a heart because it is a synonym for life, it is the most important organ,” he said.
“A heart like everyone else,” Jhonatan, 2019, Llano Grande (photo: Colectivo (Des)tejiendo Miradas archive)
In a second phase, these and other textile narratives were exhibited in Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cali, Fusagasugá, Medellín, Popayán, and cities outside of Colombia. Exhibition visitors were invited to join (Un-)Stitching Gazes workshops with the aim to respond, by means of needle and thread, to the question: What have these textile narratives inspired you to stitch, un-stitch, or re-stitch? This question has sparked over 200 textile resonances to date.
The focus on different kinds of resonances means to look for connections, shared histories, and similar threads, but also for dissonances between the stories of peace signatories, conflict victims, and other members of Colombian society.
In prolonged resonances, stitches merge into collective memories, in which the same story repeats itself, only with different protagonists. For instance, a textile narrative by Yonatan, the 8-year-old son of a peace signatory whose embroidery told the story of how paramilitaries killed his mother, resonated with Estefa, a 25-year-old woman in Popayán whose father was killed in a similar way.
In diffuse resonances, a peace signatory’s textile narrative inspires a workshop participant to reflect, via needle and thread, on questions of co-responsibility. By connecting the past armed conflict with ongoing violences, diffuse resonances allow for more complex interpretations of social and political conflicts.
In this way, diffuse resonances allude to the interdependence of violences such as impunity, targeted killings, patriarchy, extractivism, homo- and transphobia, domestic violence, and many more. A textile resonance by a workshop participant in Medellín reads: “We don’t know where the wound begins, nor where it ends.”
“We don’t know where the wound begins,” Medellín, 2021 (photo: Colectivo (Des)tejiendo Miradas archive).
Other diffuse resonances speak to their maker’s hope that change is possible. This could be a change of personal views from “indifference” to “conscience,” as depicted by an embroiderer in Cali, or the societal change that can entail when “we write peace among all of us,” as a participant in Medellín reflected.
“We write peace among all of us,” Medellín, 2022 (photo: Colectivo (Des)tejiendo Miradas archive)
By means of textile-making, the (Un-)Stitching Gazes process not only enabled dialogue across divides, participants also unstitched and restitched their attitudes and practices. In this way, the project’s textile methodology made a small, but tangible contribution to an ongoing process of building lasting peace.
About
(Un-)Stitching Gazes / (Des)tejiendo Miradas is a series of projects carried out in collaboration between researchers and activists in Colombia and the UK. To find out more, visit the bilingual website (English/Spanish): https://des-tejiendomiradas.com
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara is a professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, UK, and the co-lead of the (Un-)Stitching Gazes / (Des)tejiendo Miradas project. For further information, see: https://research.aber.ac.uk/en/persons/berit-bliesemann-de-guevara
Christine Andra
Christine Andrä is an assistant professor of International Relations at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She was a postdoctoral researcher during the first phase of the (Un-)Stitching Gazes / (Des)tejiendo Miradas project. For further information, see: https://www.rug.nl/staff/c.i.andra/
