Lines of Life: Ancestral Shipibo-Konibo Textile Traditions in the Peruvian Amazon
Xapiri has published a report, as they label it, of their work over the last nine months, in collaboration with Alianza Arkana. They’ve chronicled all that it takes to create the traditional textiles of the Shipibo-Konibo people who live deep in the Peruvian Amazon. These people are renowned for their textiles, the designs coming from ceremonial life, along with spiritual and practical understanding of medicinal plants. This is hardly a dry recounting but instead a visually beautiful multimedia document that includes text, photography by Tui Anandi and video by Leeroy Mills. Really, this is a rare opportunity to enter the village Paohyan, the culture, and particularly the life of textile artist Pekon Rabi.
These textiles may be familiar to many of you having traveled in Peru. The process to create them is long, no shortcuts here. The chitoni, a traditional cotton wrap skirt woven on a backstrap loom, takes about two months from picking the cotton to painting the final pattern.
Artist Pekon Rabi with her textiles. Photo credit: Tui Anandi.
Kené is the artwork that symbolizes the cosmic path and order. Done only by women, it comes to them in visions and dreams from Inka, the celestial woman. This description so reminds me of the Maya weavers of the Chiapas, Mexico highlands, always women, who also receive their designs in dreams.
This tradition, as many, is becoming a lost art. In this documentation, Xapiri and Alianza Arkana hope to further their common mission of supporting Amazonian traditions. Lines of Life will be for those who appreciate tradition and its ability to cause us to come home to what matters.
Read it here. It’s an invitation to savor the richness of this culture and its art.
The Lifepath Dialogues 