Crafting ecologies of existence: More than human community making in Colombian textile craftivism

Abstract

Based on ethnographic work with several women’s textile making collectives in Colombia, this article approaches their crafting practices as everyday doings of socio-ecological reparation, in the midst of social and environmental devastation caused by the armed conflict. Rather than focusing on the relevance of their activities for political activism and historical memory, an ecological perspective allows us to emphasise their work as a mundane, more than social process of communal regeneration. We discuss how women in these collectives, after painful and violent displacements, craft new ecologies of existence: relations and interdependencies within more than human worlds that cultivate new modes of care and attention, values and sensibilities in precarious living spaces. Ecological reparation is an everyday, vital, ongoing practice essential for community resurgence and for re-establishing collectivities that sustain liveable worlds.