Bordar el Desborde
Las Bordadoras
de Isla Negra
Embroidering the Overflow
The Ebroiderers of Isla Negra
Luz Marmentini
Direction
The exhibition Bordar el Desborde, Las Bordadoras de Isla Negra (Embroidering the Overflow, the Embroiderers of Isla Negra) was created as a tribute to the women of Isla Negra, who with their creative hands produced the work displayed in this showcase at the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA). This tribute took place exactly 50 years after their first appearance in this same museum, which was promoted by its director Nemesio Antúnez in 1969.
Alongside Alejandra Araya (Historian), Andrea Durán (Visual Artist), and Alma Rates (Filmmaker), we held a series of beautiful encounters starting in 2016 with the authors in their homes, where we listened to their personal accounts and they shared their life experiences. This gave rise to the curatorial essence developed by Alejandra and Andrea, based on the poetics of their imagination and the sensations of living integrated with their environment; the beauty and wisdom of nature.
We also dedicated a space to the missing Bordado Colectivo (Collective Embroidery) created in 1972, and a tribute to a creative embroiderer who recently had passed away.
We had the work thanks to the collection of more than 40 embroideries from the Isla Negra Foundation, we recorded their personal accounts on video, and we reproduced the landscape and sustenance of their surroundings through images and sound. Trinidad Moreno and Rodrigo Latrach from Manual Museografía provided a subtle interpretation and a poetic design. Experts in textile conservation from the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, Paloma Casado and Norka Ivanov, collaborated on the careful installation of the works. Under the sponsorship of the MNBA and the Archivo Central Andrés Bello (Andrés Bello Central Archive) of the University of Chile and with the support of the Eladio Sobrino Foundation of Isla Negra, we inaugurated the exhibition on August 29, 2019, with the embroiderers as special guests and a massive presence from the Isla Negra community.
Curatorship
Alejandra Araya | Historian
Andrea Durán | Visual Artist
The imagination of the Bordadoras de Isla Negra and their techniques of representation make them key pieces of contemporary folk art and a fundamental link in a creative chain that unites women of different times in the construction of a space for themselves within daily life, transforming their domestic territories, their dwellings, and their memory into the territories of artists, stitch by stitch
La selección de obras responde a las siguientes formas y temas
1. Bordando imaginería (embroidering imagery)
2. Fuga desbordada (overflowing escape)
3. Al borde del mito (on the edge of myth)
4. Desbordarse: dicese de los ríos cuando se salen de madre (to overflow: said of rivers when they burst their banks)
5. Imaginería del borde y el desborde imagery of the edge and the overflow)
Audiovisual
Alma Rates | Directing and Editing
Mirko Petrovich | Programming and Technical Consultancy
This section consists of a series of videos produced to complement the visit to the exhibition, introducing some of the authors and allowing visitors to experience the world that surrounds them.
Ellas (Them) is a documentary video featuring conversations with Purísima Ibarra, Rosa Santander, and Narcisa Catalán, all of whom are embroiderers. Additionally, there is a sensory space where the public is invited to enter the sounds and images of Isla Negra and the women’s homes. Finally, we are fortunate to have invaluable historical material: images from a TVN report on the inauguration of UNCTAD III, in which Eduardo Martínez Bonati (Visual Artist and Curator of the exhibition held for that occasion) describes the Bordado Colectivo in great detail.
Furthermore, the documentary Lana Mágica (Magic Wool), produced in the late 1980s by filmmaker Cecilia Domeyko, is also on display.
Museography
Trinidad Moreno | Designer
Rodrigo Latrach | Designer
Manual Museografía
A museographical journey through 3 areas (context, the work, and the inner world of the embroiderers) based on our main concepts: the freedom of the overflow, embroidery as a multidimensional object, and warmth as a material language. This translated into the design of a disordered and asymmetrical grid, with diverse furniture and supports that require the visitor to adopt different postures to appreciate the pieces. The use of wood and light colors conveys warmth and allows for the expression of the pieces individually and as a whole, with their infinite richness of imagery, color, and language.
After an analysis of the embroidery as an object, we wanted to make the women’s act of creation present through the mounting of the pieces; they embroider on their laps, advancing by rotating the fabric, resulting in a textured, asymmetrical piece of great expressiveness, without necessarily having a top or bottom, and where its reverse side contains almost as much richness as the front.
We designed undulating tables that allude to the women’s skirts, suspended supports, and a circular table that invite the visitor to explore the pieces from different perspectives.
We feel that with this exhibition, a debt of recognition to these creators and their infinite imagination is partially settled; it gives presence to an absence and offers the global public an aesthetic experience that is warm and intimate.
Sponsorship
Touring Exhibition
Bordar el Desborde, Las Bordadoras de Isla Negra toured throughout southern Chile.
Following its stay at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, the exhibition visited various galleries and cities across the country from 2020 to 2024, with a hiatus during the pandemic.
