48
C. L. Moreno Biec
develop the ability to be present in the world, and garner the well-being that comes
from it. If this is something that we cannot buy, how can we know what we need?
Firstly, we need to understand how we can engage with the world.
This is the moment to stop putting everything into words, stop touching only
screens, and start experiencing the world in a haptic way, because today we can
access luxury not just with money but with our own senses and mind. The question
is, is it possible to learn how to do so? This is where it becomes necessary to look into
the role of ancestral textiles as communicators and the holistic world of connections
that they hold.
2 Khipu
The Khipu system, a knotting language created by the Incas in Latin America, was a
form of both recording data and storytelling, preserving their culture through these
knots. This system is so complex that it has never been fully translated, but Khipu
expresses its own form of beauty once one becomes familiar with it, and that beauty is
in its tactility. The scope of this language is vast, having been used to record universal
matters like cities, constellations, time, planets, and so on; all the knowledge of the
universe embodied in knots. Khipu is a visual language that speaks of its own process,
to name things that cannot be named.
Nowadays, these Khipus take a form of art to tell stories. Time wears out these
fragile spaces and does not succeed in keeping alive the memory of everything that
has happened in these places. There might exist a preconception in the mind of the
user according to which it is impossible to know precisely the stories told by Khipus
because of the multiple possible variables. This way of telling stories in fact presents
many physical similarities between different pieces, and one could even think that
the knots are all “identical”, but the difference lies in the vision that each one gives to
it. Also, another important fact is that in the Inca Empire only the Quipucamayocs, a
class of trained specialists in Khipu, had the knowledge of how to read them, which
means that even for many people of its own society this language was a mystery.
This is sometimes the main obstacle for unwritten languages: because the meanings
they hold are not implicit in any society, they always need someone willing to learn
about them and others willing to be taught. It is a knowledge that needs engagement
from both parties to be passed on. For the Incas, it was only available for a certain
part of society.
Two of the most relevant Khipu artists are Jorge Eielson and Cecilia Vicuña, both
visual artists and poets, finding in poetry the closest language to emotions. Eielson
made Khipu the main resource for his exhibition On the Other Side of Languages
[12] where he takes this system to another level showing the limits of conventional
languages, putting in Khipus made of fabric those unspeakable matters. He uses
these knots as a mechanism of emotional expression. Tarragon and Restany analyse
Eielson’s work as based on different codes that merge into a single language: “The
integration of this continuous event that is the universe; the extreme fluidity of the
C. L. Moreno Biec
develop the ability to be present in the world, and garner the well-being that comes
from it. If this is something that we cannot buy, how can we know what we need?
Firstly, we need to understand how we can engage with the world.
This is the moment to stop putting everything into words, stop touching only
screens, and start experiencing the world in a haptic way, because today we can
access luxury not just with money but with our own senses and mind. The question
is, is it possible to learn how to do so? This is where it becomes necessary to look into
the role of ancestral textiles as communicators and the holistic world of connections
that they hold.
2 Khipu
The Khipu system, a knotting language created by the Incas in Latin America, was a
form of both recording data and storytelling, preserving their culture through these
knots. This system is so complex that it has never been fully translated, but Khipu
expresses its own form of beauty once one becomes familiar with it, and that beauty is
in its tactility. The scope of this language is vast, having been used to record universal
matters like cities, constellations, time, planets, and so on; all the knowledge of the
universe embodied in knots. Khipu is a visual language that speaks of its own process,
to name things that cannot be named.
Nowadays, these Khipus take a form of art to tell stories. Time wears out these
fragile spaces and does not succeed in keeping alive the memory of everything that
has happened in these places. There might exist a preconception in the mind of the
user according to which it is impossible to know precisely the stories told by Khipus
because of the multiple possible variables. This way of telling stories in fact presents
many physical similarities between different pieces, and one could even think that
the knots are all “identical”, but the difference lies in the vision that each one gives to
it. Also, another important fact is that in the Inca Empire only the Quipucamayocs, a
class of trained specialists in Khipu, had the knowledge of how to read them, which
means that even for many people of its own society this language was a mystery.
This is sometimes the main obstacle for unwritten languages: because the meanings
they hold are not implicit in any society, they always need someone willing to learn
about them and others willing to be taught. It is a knowledge that needs engagement
from both parties to be passed on. For the Incas, it was only available for a certain
part of society.
Two of the most relevant Khipu artists are Jorge Eielson and Cecilia Vicuña, both
visual artists and poets, finding in poetry the closest language to emotions. Eielson
made Khipu the main resource for his exhibition On the Other Side of Languages
[12] where he takes this system to another level showing the limits of conventional
languages, putting in Khipus made of fabric those unspeakable matters. He uses
these knots as a mechanism of emotional expression. Tarragon and Restany analyse
Eielson’s work as based on different codes that merge into a single language: “The
integration of this continuous event that is the universe; the extreme fluidity of the