Despligue de la guardia nacional

2025
Cotton and cotton blend fabric scraps, felt, wool sourced from Chile, burlap, polyester embroidery thread
16 x 12 inches

Over the past few months, I have been thinking through questions about images and affect of political violence, and what “denuncia” can mean in contexts of regime. I find myself considering these questions in the everyday moments of my life in DC — long metro rides to my job, phone calls with my family filled with political anxiety, people telling you they’re doing as okay as they can ‘in these times,’ and especially recently, passing through soldier crowds near my home. As a fiber artist and researcher of dictatorship-era history and Chile, the ‘arpillera’ emerged as an obvious answer. Created by women artists during the Pinochet dictatorship, the arpillera is an art form composed of hand-embroidered appliqué scenes made of fabric scraps, documenting political violence rampant during the dictatorship. In this new series, I think of the arpillera as a method in addition to formal or material object. In replicating the motifs part of my fiber heritage as a Chilean-American, I find a way of documenting quotidian and everyday moments of political violence, revealing textures (quilted fabrics, burlap backings) of things that might be thought of as transitions. Paired in this context with historical arpilleras from the Fundación Solidaridad in the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, my arpilleras are an attempt at showing how people can use fiber to not only document, but index, political violence experienced at the level of surging affect, where life is lived.