Bordadoras de Isla Negra was a group of self-taught women who, between 1967 and 1980, embroidered brightly coloured textiles that vividly tell the story of daily life in this coastal village in Chile. The creation of Bordadoras de Isla Negra was organised by Eduardo Martinez Bonati, the artistic advisor to the Third Session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD III). It was assembled in a record time of 275 days, with the work of thousands of workers, architects, craftsmen, and artists, and was inaugurated on April 3, 1972. The task was to create a textile that would enter into an aesthetic dialogue with the building constructed as the UNCTAD III headquarters and which would be recognised as the work of the people. The intimate, fragmentary, and paused construction of these textiles, embroidered with brightly coloured wools, is fundamental to understanding their strength and expressive freedom in a locally inherited craft. The characters are real and recognisable inhabitants of Isla Negra, including Pablo Neruda hunting butterflies. This enormous textile was embroidered from individual cloths with different environments, all of which were joined together to form a cross section of Chile, from the sea to the Andes. The embroidery was stolen and disappeared in September 1973, after the Pinochet dictatorship had taken over the building as its centre of operations. It reappeared in August 2019 and is today once more reintegrated in the building.
This is the first time the work of Bordadoras de Isla Negra is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Carolina Arévalo Karl
