Word and Thread

The work of fiber artist Mercedes Azpilicueta surrounding gender nonconforming individual Antonio de Erauso is a case study exploring the political potential of textiles as a decolonial technology of embodied knowledge transmission. I articulate the materiality of fiber as a conceptual tool for exploring the relationship between the coloniality of gender and embodied epistemologies. First, I deploy three countervisual methodologies (speculation, citationality, and diffraction) as hermeneutics into the artist’s intervention on colonial visual archives of conquest. Second, I analyze Azpilicueta’s critique and subversion of the coloniality of the gendered decorative. Third, I discuss her remediation of disavowed affective-material-embodied epistemological forms of inquiry, identifying her sensorial engagement with textiles with collective practices that relate to corporeal knowledge as a form of knowing and as a system for storing and transmitting knowledge. Finally, taking as its root Tim Ingold’s “textility of making,” I conceptualize transtextility as a theoretical proposition to think about how the artist’s transfeminist materialist practices of making bridge textile practice and textile theory through the materiality of fiber. This mode of textile relationality reworks questions of matter as a process of materialization by binding the making to what I call a tactile and sensuous “maquiraicu way of knowing” and to forms of being-as-becoming in the world, where its movement is not only fluid, itinerative, and improvisatory but also nonteleologically continuously forward-oriented. The structure of this essay reproduces the materiality of warp-and-weft combinations in a tapestry.