Dressing Dissent: Textile Activism, Citizen Photography, and the Politics of Care in Colombia’s 2021 Social Uprising

This paper examines textiles as active participants in shaping political expression and mobilization during Colombia’s 2021 social uprising ( Estallido Social ). Through a collaborative methodology, we invited people who documented the protests to share photographs showing how protesters dressed and how textiles appeared in urban spaces. The resulting visual archive offers counter-narratives to dominant media portrayals of the protests as violent and criminal. Our analysis of clothing, banners, and textile interventions reveals them as repertoires of contention that introduced temporalities, scales, and actors overlooked by conventional accounts of protest. Textiles operated simultaneously as protection, expression, and vehicles of a politics of care that ran alongside—not against—confrontation. Through dense description of selected photographs, we show how textile practices foreground collective care, festivity, and everyday resistance as constitutive dimensions of mobilization. Combining visual methodology, textile perspectives, and collaborative curation, the paper positions personal photographs as forms of civic and political action—research tools that illuminate the intimate and caring dimensions of social mobilization that conventional documentation leaves unseen.