Textiles that testify: Colombian scholar shows how communities respond to conflict with craft

Amanda Broome

12 Mar 2025

In a group of people Tania Perez-Bustos is centered in the frame, her attention is fixed on a piece of fabric that can be seen hanging in the foreground. — Tania Pérez-Bustos, who will be a visiting scholar in Blacksburg from March 19–21, views a textile created by a participant of her textile laboratory — an activity of her participatory textile and craft research. Photo courtesy of Tania Pérez-Bustos.

From the clothes on your back right now to the sheets warming you at night, textiles serve as more than just functional objects.

Colombian scholar Tania Pérez-Bustos, who will visit Blacksburg as a scholar-in-residence from March 19–21, examines how they become instruments of political struggle, memory-making, and collective healing. A professor in the School of Gender Studies at the National University of Colombia, she researches how communities use textile practices to document experiences of conflict and create pathways toward reconciliation.

“As soon as we are born, we are covered in a textile. And when we die, we are dressed to go to the grave,” Pérez-Bustos said. “These objects are not just utilitarian, they can be testimonies — testifying to situations of pain, suffering, or reparation.”

Best known for her research into Colombian communities’ responses to decades of conflict and its aftermath through the creation of textiles and crafts, Pérez-Bustos embeds herself in these communities to observe how textile-making serves as a form of storytelling, activism, and memory preservation.

Her visit to Virginia Tech is hosted by the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and the Center for International Research, Education and Development, providing opportunities for students and faculty members to engage with her work.

Engaging Virginia Tech in participatory research

For Pérez-Bustos, research is a hands-on experience. Rather than studying textile pieces from a distance, she actively participates in their creation alongside the communities she researches.

“The type of research I do is done through the making of the textiles themselves. I don’t simply go and study pieces that are being made; rather, I participate in the making of the pieces,” Pérez-Bustos said. “For me, research is embodied. I cannot understand the communities or the pieces they make if I don’t participate in the making with them.”

To bring this approach to Virginia Tech, Pérez-Bustos will lead a participatory workshop titled “Weaving a Multitude of Stories,” hosted by El Centro. Participants will contribute to a shared textile display using their own clothing. This workshop, to be held March 19, has limited space and requires pre-registration.

The stories told through textiles

Pérez-Bustos will also lead two discussions highlighting how separate communities in Colombia used craft as mediums for activism and remembrance.

According to Pérez-Bustos, these communities are “mostly communities of women who have been either direct victims of Colombia’s internal war or are social leaders and organizers actively recognizing others’ experiences of suffering. Through textile crafts, the communities I have been working in have kept alive the memory of people and the places where they live and poetically and peacefully claimed representation of silenced wrongs.”

Some of the case studies she will explore include:

Forged tiles: In an anti-monument art installation by renowned Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, tiles forged from weapons pave the floor. Victims of sexual violence during the conflict designed these tiles, transforming an object of utility into a testament to pain, resilience, and remembrance.
Poison River textile: A community around the Atrato River created a tapestry memorializing their forced displacement after illegal mining poisoned the river, their primary source of sustenance. The piece captures both the community’s dispossession and the environmental destruction of their homeland.
Embroidered “pañuelos”: Over 400 hand-embroidered pañuelos, or handkerchiefs, memorialize social leaders assassinated after Colombia’s peace agreement. Part of the art installation “Ojo de la Aguja,” or “Eye of the Needle,” these textiles serve as a call to stop the bloodshed.

Engaging with the stories

Pérez-Bustos will present these case studies and her research at the Women and Girls in International Development Discussion Series in a talk titled “Material Stories of Healing, Survival, and Dignity in Colombia’s Struggle for Peace: Forged Tiles, Poisoned Rivers, and Embroidered Pañuelos.”

The event will be held in the Newman Library’s Goodall (Multipurpose) Room and via Zoom at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, March 20. The talk is open to all, but pre-registration is encouraged.

Pérez-Bustos’ final presentation, “Textile Companions: A Feminist Approach to Material Kin,” will take place from 1:30–3 p.m. Friday, March 21, in the Newman Library Athenaeum and via Zoom. Sponsored by the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, this talk is especially relevant for students and faculty in the department.

For more information and to access the Zoom links, visit the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences events page.