The Weaver

The daily life experience of resistance to historical oblivion. In my ethnographic research among women from the Huarpe indigenous communities of today’s Mendoza, Argentina, weaving emerged as a practice of threading past and present – a long moment of performative meditation over identity, community and survivance and a tradition handed down from one generation of women to the next. The repetitive movements and concentration involved in the practice of weaving make time feel special: “Weaving has the time of here. It is our own time… our own rhythm”, Laura (the participant) detailed when explaining why she wanted to be filmed weaving. This time recounts the stories of enslaved ancestors, of the lost language, of land dispossession. Weaving is a performative act of resistance to let go of time. The film seeks to elicit emotional reactions of impatience to convey the importance of creating one’s own time as an act of resistance.