58
C. L. Moreno Biec
an expo day in the main square of the town where the children not only demonstrated
how to weave, but they also taught the community how to do so by themselves.
Suddenly, an older man started to weave without any problem, and the woman next
to him started to cry. No one understood the situation until she explained that the man,
her husband, was suffering from Alzheimer’s that he barely remembered anything
at all, and this was the first time in a very long time that he had managed to retain
something, namely the steps to do the weaving.
Experiences like this one are priceless. No one can put a price on the happiness of
this wife seeing her husband acquiring and retaining new knowledge. No one could
explain in words how this man understood the weaving process, but what we can do
is to analyse the factors around this situation: we have the knowledge of the children
that they obtained by getting engaged with the culture that was already present in the
area but to a large extent forgotten. This knowledge was about mastering a manual
technique that engages many of the senses. To take the technique and the knowledge
to the next level, they decided to share it with the community, generating an awareness
of the past of their own identity. After all these steps, the knowledge about the use
of this loom has now been spread across the whole community. This made people
interact and generate connections and these two factors generated well-being not
just for the students or the elderly couple in question, but also for the people who
witnessed the emotion of this scene.
Now, we are driven to feel emotions, to be more conscious about what is happening
around us, and we cannot be blind about the role that we have to play. Bringing
back the wisdom of ancestral languages and techniques and adapting them to our
needs, we can now redefine the concept of luxury. It now is about capturing things
and their whole meaning, like the Khipu system did. It is about offering pleasure
and unforgettable memories through the engagement of the body in its entirety,
considering humans as a whole entity with the need for connections in order to
ensure well-being.
As Martien Van Zuilen says in the research Through the Eye of a Needle, textiles (but in this case, we could say craft products in general) can now be read like
“a narrative text that chronicles and translates personal experience, cultural identification, and socio-cultural life embedded in multiple layers of meanings”. The
most meaningful narrative is no longer at the end, but in the process of making and
discovery.
It is our task to encourage makers and craftspeople to keep going, to keep ancestral
knowledge alive, to engage our senses more deeply, and to make us react to a turbulent
world that needs people who can appreciate the value of staying connected in the
most conscious way possible.
C. L. Moreno Biec
an expo day in the main square of the town where the children not only demonstrated
how to weave, but they also taught the community how to do so by themselves.
Suddenly, an older man started to weave without any problem, and the woman next
to him started to cry. No one understood the situation until she explained that the man,
her husband, was suffering from Alzheimer’s that he barely remembered anything
at all, and this was the first time in a very long time that he had managed to retain
something, namely the steps to do the weaving.
Experiences like this one are priceless. No one can put a price on the happiness of
this wife seeing her husband acquiring and retaining new knowledge. No one could
explain in words how this man understood the weaving process, but what we can do
is to analyse the factors around this situation: we have the knowledge of the children
that they obtained by getting engaged with the culture that was already present in the
area but to a large extent forgotten. This knowledge was about mastering a manual
technique that engages many of the senses. To take the technique and the knowledge
to the next level, they decided to share it with the community, generating an awareness
of the past of their own identity. After all these steps, the knowledge about the use
of this loom has now been spread across the whole community. This made people
interact and generate connections and these two factors generated well-being not
just for the students or the elderly couple in question, but also for the people who
witnessed the emotion of this scene.
Now, we are driven to feel emotions, to be more conscious about what is happening
around us, and we cannot be blind about the role that we have to play. Bringing
back the wisdom of ancestral languages and techniques and adapting them to our
needs, we can now redefine the concept of luxury. It now is about capturing things
and their whole meaning, like the Khipu system did. It is about offering pleasure
and unforgettable memories through the engagement of the body in its entirety,
considering humans as a whole entity with the need for connections in order to
ensure well-being.
As Martien Van Zuilen says in the research Through the Eye of a Needle, textiles (but in this case, we could say craft products in general) can now be read like
“a narrative text that chronicles and translates personal experience, cultural identification, and socio-cultural life embedded in multiple layers of meanings”. The
most meaningful narrative is no longer at the end, but in the process of making and
discovery.
It is our task to encourage makers and craftspeople to keep going, to keep ancestral
knowledge alive, to engage our senses more deeply, and to make us react to a turbulent
world that needs people who can appreciate the value of staying connected in the
most conscious way possible.