» Looking Back on Women Weaving Worlds: Living Resistance Weaving Solidarity

Feed on: Posts; Comments

Looking Back on Women Weaving Worlds: Living Resistance

Apr 1st, 2011 by smithrac

Photo by Mirah Valdes

I’m excited that I’ve had the opportunity to participate in Geography 495 in my final semester at UBC. It has been an entirely unique experience to work in cooperation with the autonomous indigenous women’s weaving cooperative Jolom Mayaetik and this has allowed me to depart from typical academic models of learning. The fact that the course is based on a community service learning model has allowed me the opportunity to take part in organizing an exhibition of Jolom Mayaetik’s work, which took place on Wednesday March 16^th 2011, and was curated by Celia Ruiz the president of the cooperative. We called the exhibition Women Weaving World: Living Resistance, in order to emphasize the lived experience of weaving. The evening took place in the Simon KY Global Lounge on UBC campus, and featured weavings from the women in the cooperative, as well as a weaving demonstration from Celia.

Our hope for the exhibition was that people would begin to understand the lived experience of weaving. We hoped that those that attended the exhibition would not simply look at the pieces that were on display, and understand them in their final form, but that they would think of the process and hours that went i

nto their creation. To this end, we incorporated images of the weaving process throughout the exhibition. Celia also spoke about the history of the cooperative, which was followed by a demonstration of the weaving technique on the

back strap loom.

From my perspective, the most interesting aspect of the exhibition was how people were looking at the weaving differently after they saw the demonstration. They were interested in touching the pieces, and many people were interested in learning how long specific pieces would take to complete. Overall, I feel lucky to have been a part of organizing Women Weaving Worlds: Living Resistance. It was a totally unique way to learn, and I look forward to our final event on April 19^th, which will incorporate an exhibition and silent auction.