Cosmic Tapestries

Kiu-Pa Collective

Curated by Adriana Herrera

Dec. 04^th/2024. | MIFA (Miami International Fine Arts)

In 1965, a group of women embarked on a collective journey of discovery to the South American territory that holds the continent’s most extensive remnants of rock art: Venezuela. With a shared vision and anonymity, they began creating handwoven tapestries with the latch-hook technique, and virgin wools, carefully transferring sacred figures from ancient Indigenous petroglyphs onto hemp. They chose a name as revealing as their work: Kiu-pa. This term from the pre-Columbian cultures of the Timote and Cuica peoples of Venezuela’s Andean regions means “path.”  That same year, Anni Albers—the renowned weaver who directed the Bauhaus School’s textile, and the most influential figure in integrating textiles into modern art—published her book On Weaving, with a revealing dedication: “To my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.” Though no communication existed between Albers and the founders of Kiu-pa, both practices drew from the same wellspring of ancient iconography linked to prehistoric art’s sacred and mythic essence.

Through their work, during more than six decades, the Kiu-pa Collective weavers (which now also include men) have been revaluating the prodigious manual labor of ancient artists who anonymously inscribed into stone cosmogonic figures, carriers of an unknown world order. They have never sought to decipher this mystery but have embraced it as the starting point of a shared effort that brings about unexpected revelations. Their goal has never been simply the perfect completion of a tapestry—the textile object that preserves, in a new medium, the legacy of sacred petroglyphs—but rather the transformative value of intertwining through collective work.

Each tapestry, woven anonymously and collectively, is the trace of a process of dialogue that unifies times in a unique warp: a conjunction between the joint exploration of ancient languages and the experience of personal transformation that arises from reconstructing their presence in the textile with maximum, fine-tuned attention in the present. The Kiu-pa weavers intertwine stitch by stitch the very old and the new, in an anonymous and collective work nourished by experiences and visions of the sacred.