A Visit with Mater Iniciativa/MIL Restaurant and its Neighboring Communities.
We often overlook how space and the environment shape our lived experiences and contribute to how we produce culture. Within the culinary and agricultural spheres, MIL and Mater seem intent on countering this tendency, looking more closely and appreciating more critically the way the environment not only surrounds us physically but shapes how we experience things culturally and socially—and this is also what drives my own interests as a History of Art and Visual Studies scholar, though in slightly different contexts…and it is what led me to contact MIL and Mater to see how I could work with them for a brief time.
Doing research for my dissertation in Peru this year I found my way to Mater Iniciativa because my own work looks at how landscape and spatial environment shape cultural experience—namely visual culture, and especially weaving practices in the highland Andes. In a nice convergence of timing and interests, I learned that Mater has been working on weaving-related projects with a group of local women from neighboring Kacllaraccay, who recently formed the Taller Warmi dye workshop in collaboration with another earlier visiting Mater researcher, Giulia Pompilj.
The local women, a group spearheaded by Ceferina Atau, have been reviving their natural dye traditions and finding new dye materials in the surrounding landscape to apply to their knitting and (backstrap loom) weaving projects. Through these initiatives they are deepening how their textile practices relate to the natural environment at a time when traditional weaving and craft practices and their associations with the Andean space, and ideas of local place, have been ever strained by market forces and tourist trends.
Alongside Mater’s cultural director, Verónica Tabja, I had the chance to meet with some of the Kacllaraccay women and ask them about their weaving practices, and how the space they inhabit and the natural features of the landscape find their way into their knit products and backstrap loom weavings, particularly through motifs and dyes. [1] Although my dissertation research on Indigenous Andean weaving is rooted in an earlier history—the late Inka empire and early colonial periods—some of the questions I explore about weaving and its references to landscape, agriculture, and land use resurfaced in discussions I was able to have with the Taller Warmi women. In tandem, I was able to visit another neighboring community called Mullakas Misminay, who also shared with me their stories, memories, and accounts of how textile practices are embedded into the experience of inhabiting their space. [2] They also pointed to certain motifs (seen on textiles but also on other objects occasionally) that reflect the local landscape or the ways in which they emotionally connect with their surrounding space (for example the very contemporary ‘heart’/sunqu motif). It was clear from my conversations with women from both Kacllaraccay and Mullakas Misminay that the visual culture they live and practice is still steeped in references to the surrounding environment, its plants, the living beings that inhabit this particular space, and the way community members interact with these.
Below are a few of the design motifs the women from Kacllaraccay and Mullakas Misminay shared with me and Verónica as typical of their local tradition. As in many examples throughout Andean weavings, some of the motifs are more specific in their references than others and, some motifs suggest dual or multiple features of flora or fauna:
- At Kacllaraccay: the simple t’ika (flower; here the women specifically refer to a local red flower called Rup´u):
- Kacllaraccay: the iskon puntas (or nine points, referencing mountain peaks…but also sometimes called waka ñawi, or cow eye):
- Kacllaraccay: the more simplified puntas (which one of the women also referred to as Cerro Chicón, a more prominent mountain/apu that overlooks the community and MIL):
Kacllaraccay: and ch’uru (a snail whose abandoned shells are abundant in the clay on the community hillsides), which the Kacllaraccay women also called urpiq ñawi (bird’s eye);
- Kacllaraccay: a nice variation on the ch’uru/urpiq ñawi design that the Kacllaraccay women also shared is laka ch’uru, a design that emphasizes linkage or connection, perhaps the way we might think of a community’s internal ties:
- Mullaka’s Misminay: the ch’uru motif also came up with the women from this community (these shells are abundant throughout the area), though their renditions of the motifs were sometimes more representational than geometric, and would perhaps be more fitted to knitted designs or applications other than backstrap loom designs:
Mullaka’s Misminay: here, the women provided the simple rendition of the rhombus for a more general ñawi motif (eye):
- Mullaka’s Misminay: but they also had a more specific ñawi motif—which they called ch’aska ñawi, or (eye of the star):
- Mullaka’s Misminay: the rendition of the quwi/cuy/conejo andino (rabbit or guinea pig) and a fish:
- Both communities had renditions of a river, or mayu. The women of Kacllaraccay more specifically called their motif k’enko mayu (denoting the zigzags a river takes) and then noted that the river in question was the Río Vilcanota that runs through the valley below (further downstream called the Urubamba):
Mater Iniciativa’s experimental focus has led to projects that, like the building housing it, are nurtured by, and in turn fold into, the surrounding environment. Part of this naturally involves aligning Mater’s mission with the interests and practices of its neighbors, whose communities have long cohabited in, and with, this mountain space. My week with Mater at the Moray site, visiting with the women of Kacllaraccay and Mullaka’s Misminay, was a great opportunity to see how the ways we live in our environment, in its particular spaces or places, are made material in visual culture—performed, practiced, and activated in various ways and, furthermore, sustained over long periods of time to, hopefully, be passed on to later generations.
[1] The women from Kacllaraccay who shared aspects of their weaving traditions with me, drawing images of familiar textile motifs, were: Ceferina, Claudia, Irma. [2] The women from Mullakas Misminay who shared aspects of their weaving traditions with me, drawing images of familiar textile motifs, were: Neiry, Nayda Duran Umeres, Yesica , Milchora Quispe Quispe, Yovana, Blanca Ysabel Sanchez Amau, Nayda Uchupe.
