Our Itinerant Textile Art School
© Louise Lesaffre
The School of Textile Arts is a living testament to our journey over the years, a journey in which we have woven not only threads but also dreams. This space for learning and exploration has its roots in the efforts we have dedicated to training in various textile techniques, such as spinning, colorimetry, brocade, embroidery, and dyeing. These skills, shared among the artisans of “El Camino de los Altos”, are not only expressions of a tradition but also the tangible manifestation of a shared experience that unites us.
© El Camino de los altos
Over time, our workshops have become pillars that strengthen our technical knowledge, while also serving as creative laboratories where reinterpretations of textile art flourish. It is in these spaces where, collectively, we venture to discover new paths, using our tools and knowledge to express what we consider essential. Thus, textile art becomes a refuge for the imagination, a fertile ground for creativity, and a canvas for multiple forms of expression, where we reaffirm our esthetic values, our talent, and our know-how in every sense of the word.
© El Camino de los altos
For this reason, we have decided to expand our creative paths by formalizing teaching and learning methods, both at the association's headquarters and in the communities where our artisan colleagues live. This has led to the creation of the School of Textile Arts of El Camino de los Altos. A specialized training program in textile art that incorporates techniques such as serigraph, natural dyeing, pedal looms, high-warp loom, textile writing structure, sewing, and the promotion of creativity, all while preserving the ancestral techniques that are the heart of our tradition.
THE WORKSHOPS
© El Camino de los altos
Initially, the workshops that are part of the school’s educational offering are taught by professionals in textile art and bring together all the artisans interested in acquiring new knowledge. As these collective training sessions take place, the artisans' desire for learning strengthens, and gradually, this longing becomes intertwined with emerging leadership, a result of their training and refinement in these techniques.
In this way, some women have found their own voice as trainers, and together, we have been developing our own pedagogy, based on the transmission of knowledge from artisan to artisan, in their own language and within their living spaces; that is, in their communities. It is there, where women can organize their learning around their own needs and the management of the time they wish to invest in acquiring new knowledge, in harmony with their daily activities. The weavers not only participate in the discovery and experimentation of new techniques, but also in integrating these with the ancestral techniques of textile art.
The School of Textile Arts is sustained by the desire to nurture our creativity, contributing to the constant movement and evolution of the arts. We dream of cultivating skills among ourselves, our daughters, and other women in our communities, to create textiles of the highest quality, deeply rooted in our ancestral heritage and cultural legacy. We position ourselves in this historical memory, intertwined with new learning, to build a collective creative space with our own innovative artistic proposals that dignify and value our art, while expanding the commercial possibilities of our work and opening new horizons in the market.
The School of Textile Arts is made possible thanks to the valuable support of organizations committed to social justice, which create the conditions to sustain and promote artisanal production.
COLlECTIVE SPACES
For El Camino de los Altos, extending spaces for gathering, learning, and collaboration has been a process of deep reflection and collective effort. We are motivated by imagining that in the communities where the weavers live, there are workspaces managed according to their own logic and needs. So far, we have built two community workshops.
The first, located in the community of Bautista Chico in San Juan Chamula, is a community workshop dedicated to the traditional craft of wool. This project was carried out in collaboration with the Mexican civil association Programa VACA A.C., involving both volunteers and the working teams of both organizations. The construction incorporates traditional and vernacular techniques, and throughout the process, we learned about the possibility of alternative ways of building—methods that align with the social and environmental needs of the place where they are implemented.
At the beginning of 2020, once again in collaboration with Programa VACA A.C., we began the construction of a house-workshop in Zinacantán. For this project, we also relied on traditional and indigenous techniques. However, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, we had to pause the project, resuming it in 2022 with Bio Reconstruye, a collective specializing in natural construction and appropriate technologies.
In 2024, we succeeded in bringing this space to life thanks to the work of Cooperación Comunitaria, which implemented a rainwater harvesting cistern, a greywater treatment system using biofilters, and a dry toilet. The goal of integrating these eco-technologies into the house-workshop is to create a healthy space where our processes are environmentally friendly and to empower women to take ownership of these sustainable alternatives whenever possible.
