| Description: | This unique arpillera brings us indoors. The setting allows us to come close to the way the church groups in Chile worked around issues of human rights violations, such as killings, disappearances, torture, exile or others.
In this vivid scene, we are almost invited to join the group around the table where we can see the candles, burning brightly next to the Bible. A woman is reading aloud: it could well be information relating to the detained disappeared people they are searching for and of whom they have photos on one of the walls. A second woman has lifted her hand to signal that she wants to speak. Other men and women are actively listening.
The meeting has challenged the participants to respond to a well-known quote from the Bible: "Cain, where is your brother?" The scene evokes a deep sense of solidarity and community. In the catalogue to the Weavings of War exhibition (2005), James Young, curator of The art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, says: “This needlework expresses such memories outwardly and it gives the storyteller an inward time and space to work through such memory” (Cooke, Zeitlin A., & MacDowell M., eds. 2005, Weavings of War: Fabrics of Memory, Michigan State University, p21). |
