Laura Miani

CAMOUFLAGE textile prints filled with meaning communicating messages about Colombian (South America) ongoing conflict.

Colombian Molas, an important indigenous craft is my ongoing inspiration. A multilayered fragment part of indigenous Kuna blouses intended to symbolically protect women´s bodies since young age, a sacred constructed textile.

My patterns, a reflection of territory, derive from the manipulation of images coming from four handmade Molas I made during lockdown. Resulting from textile symbolic techniques (Mola indigenous reverse appliqué, devoré, cross dying, foil, flock, cad embroidery), the imagery I used come from historical archives and documents that are part of the national memory and are today at risk of being erased or censored.

The coherent design context for these prints is safeguard clothing, bulletproof vests and body armours in a broader sense for civilians to protect themselves literally and symbolically against conflict. Symbolically, by acknowledging this imagery and the facts portrayed and literally, by using actual bulletproof textiles such as “Aramid” within the layers of the armours.

There are four armours within “OJO!” project, each one has four different textile layers. “OJO” (oh hoh) literally means “EYE” in Spanish. In Colombia, the expression “OJO!” means “Beware!” and has recently been used in several political scenarios since 2019.

By paying attention to these prints based on its aesthetic qualities and materials before fully grasping what it is about, you might be played to contend with the patterns after getting past the first magnetism some of these coloured clichés and concepts related to Colombia and tropical Latin America generate. Maybe an uncomfortable experience of our gaze being troubled for liking something that comes from a violent background. A guilty pleasure…