Our Story

Along the way, we created the foundations for our collective. Beyond the academic aspects, a trusting and nourishing space emerged among pieces of fabric, stories and memories.

2013: 
As part of the Third International Visual Methods Conference, international curator Roberta Bacic brought 24 historic arpilleras to Wellington that were exhibited at St. Andrew’s at The Terrace. This exhibition was the first time arpilleras had been showcased in New Zealand, and its opening event commemorated 40 years since the Pinochet military coup d’etat in Chile. It brought together members of the Wellington-based Latin American community, conference attendants, and a wide range of local authorities and community members.

“... a space that allowed people to connect to that moment in history... to the process those women went through...a place for building the community here…”

2014: 
Supported by Victoria University of Wellington, research was carried out to examine the effects of the 2013 events on those who were involved.As part of this research several Wellington-based Latin American women came together and organised workshops to create their own arpilleras. Here we reflected on our experiences as migrants to Aotearoa New Zealand, in particular in terms of memories, identity and community making.
Along the way, we created the foundations for our collective. Beyond the academic aspects, a trusting and nourishing space emerged among pieces of fabric, stories and memories. We decided to contribute to our Wellington and Latin American communities by sharing the pieces we were creating.

“I had my home here, but I think the arpilleras ...
made me feel ... there is a space here for my history,
now a space we carved together.”

2015: 
We closed the cycle of creating our first pieces as arpilleristas. We celebrated this by organising and exhibition where our pieces were joined by two historic arpilleras. 
Both our finished and unfinished arpilleras were exhibited side by side acknowledging the messy and personal process involved in producing our pieces. We also created a collective one.

Through this exhibition we created an intimate, inviting and public space to 
convey the results of our journey to a wider audience. We thus presented tales of the dreams, joys, contradictions and sorrows we have encountered while making Wellington our home.

2016: 
The journey continues through this year with more workshops and some of our arpilleras travelling to different locations, reaching out to different audiences, acquiring a life of their own.

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Wellington Arpilleras Collective- 2016
arpilleraswgtn@gmail.com
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All images by Wellington Arpilleras Collective are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.