Thursday 15, Friday 16, Saturday 17 March 2012
London, UK

This conference stems from the AHRC funded project Weaving communities of practice, based at CILAVS, in collaboration with the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara (ILCA) in La Paz, Bolivia. It seeks to generate an Andean contribution to the current interests in materiality, technology, ontology and the social world. The conference focusses on Andean textiles as key media in the region for interrelating and integrating diverse forms of knowledge, through complex semiotic and graphically plural systems. In this context, the conference aims to bridge the current gap between the studies of khipus (knotted cords), and textiles (woven threads), by proposing that they both form part of a common semiotic system.

Topics for discussion include:

Textiles as records of technological knowledge
Weaving techniques, structures, instruments and bodies: doing and being
Weaving knowledge and its material expression
Weaving heritage: language, politics and cultural identity
Conference convenors: Denise Y. Arnold and Luciana Martins

Call For Papers: New extended deadline!

We invite 250-500 word proposals for 25 minute papers to be submitted now by 4 April 2011 to Miriam de Diego: m.dediego@bbk.ac.uk. The papers should respond to the precise themes of the conference. Heading the abstract you should indicate: name, surname, and title, institutional affiliation, postal address, telephone, and e-mail. Proposals can be submitted in either English or Spanish.

For more information please see the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies website.