Knotting Corporalities: From the Andes to the Soporopos

Textile making not only subverts life itself but has also provided a continuous form of resistance to a long-standing colonizing process. From this standpoint, it is essential to understand the ways in which textiles constitute a form of inhabiting the body and articulating communication mechanisms that unpick hegemonic narratives to rethread them with their own fibers.
Considering this, and more than 500 years of perseverance in the face of imposed subalternity, it becomes necessary to examine, from a decolonial perspective, the symbolic dimension and ancestral continuity of textile practices.
This article explores these ideas through the soporopos, textile artifacts created by women political prisoners during the civil-military dictatorship in Chile, where fabric scraps came to life as a medium of communication and affection. These creations subverted the understanding of textile making by embodying corporeality, the notion of living death, and the crossing of prison boundaries in freedom.