A Return Through the Origins of Modernity … Pishi-pishimanta, awaspa, ñawpa kawsayniyta, saphiykunata, tarishani …

Abstract

Abstract This paper intends to be shared as a personal testimony and hopes to be taken by the reader as a lived experience rather than mere academic research. Thus, although the text is based on historical evidence, the notion of “history” should not be understood as a linear succession of events but more as cyclical stories and times that are constantly Weaving themselves together into a present. Weaving, as a structuring activity generated by body-mind, space-time, human-nature relationships, has precisely structured natural, social, political, and cultural ecosystems of human life since the beginning of time. Weaving is, therefore, one of the primary expressive means that puts culture into practice. This essay aims to revive the paradoxical path—shaped by stories and processes of migration, colonization, and decolonization—that led to my reunion with Andean Weaving outside my country. Finding alive the voices that gave birth to the material language of my Indigenous ancestors through the textile medium provoked a revolution on my way of being, feeling, thinking, and making. Therefore, this work attempts to develop critical feel-thinking around the colonial system that calls itself “modern” and has perpetuated the dominant Western culture against the Indigenous. I welcome the reader to navigate throughout these lines with an open perception of the notions of modernity/tradition, art/craft, body/mind, past/present, reverting and expanding its binary condition imposed by colonial power structures.