Time(s) to Listen: Anthropology/Design Encounters in the Design of a Colombian Exhibition on Reconciliation

Abstract

This paper follows the shaping of “Time(s) to Listen,” an exhibition born at the intersection of anthropology/design practices related to listening embedded into testimonial digital textiles in the context of armed conflict and reconciliation in Colombia. This configuration process demonstrates how anthropology and design can be mutually enriching and contributes to situating design practices in exhibition-making as tools for the generation of wholehearted material encounters, in this case, related to listening. For this, the paper dwells ethnographically in three moments of “Time(s) to Listen” emergence and shows three types of listening that these moments represent: one related to textile making and the listening atmosphere that this material practice generates, a second moment in which the exhibition prototyping detaches from textile making practice and embraces listening as a digital-textile object, and lastly the mise-en-scène of the exhibition in which textile making and its capacity of generating an embodied listening is reclaimed to generate meaningful collective encounters between audiences and communities.

Keywords:

• anthropology/design practices
• exhibition prototyping
• listening
• textile craft

Acknowledgments

I thank the comments received by Lucy Suchman, Santiago Martínez and Blanca Callén in the first and second versions of the text and the copyediting work of Adam Frick.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To see more about the distinction between things (materials in movement, relation and formation) and object (entities in themselves, made of multiple materials with particular properties) see Chapter 2 of Sophie Woodward’s book Material Methods (2020).

2 Memory sewing circles, costureros de la memoria, are collectives that through textile practices document life amid war. This memory work connects personal, collective, and public spaces where the textile pieces are made and also exhibited as ways of testimony.

3 In Spanish, there is no distinction in the naming of the person who weaves, knits, or crochets; all of them are called tejedoras. This is a female noun.

4 Minga for Amerindian communities refers to the gathering of the community to carry out community tasks or to solve problems of members of their collective.

5 This minga took place in Nottingham; a group of 10 international artists and activists participated, working with digital and textile languages.

6 For more information about the pieces see: http://artesanaltecnologica.org/tiempos/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Colombian Ministry of Science and Technology and by Universidad Nacional de Colombia Code 40477.

Notes on contributors

Tania Pérez-Bustos

Tania Pérez-Bustos is Professor at Universidad Nacional of Colombia, School of Gender Studies. Her research focuses on Textile making as technologies of knowledge and caring. [email protected]