Collection Research | Textile practices as ways to heal, care and resist

Luisa Michelsen is an Arts Manager and Programme Curator with a Master’s Degree in Museology/Museography from University of Westminster UK. As a British-Peruvian bi-national she has a deep understanding of Latin American and British art and culture enabling connections beyond the fine arts and into all areas of historical, modern and contemporary culture. Most recently as Arts Manager in British Council Peru, she has worked leading innovative strategic programmes to develop the cultural sector and social impact within the Americas. She has a keen interest in work that is multi-artform and participatory, challenges uses of public space, supports positive social change and represents the expression and creativity of diverse voices.

Magdalena Wiener is an Art Historian and Cultural Anthropologists who is currently working as freelance Cultural Manager and Curator, and as Research Associate at the Research Center of Material Culture in Leiden. She has worked several years as project manager at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin before she joined the Goethe-Institut in Mexico, where she was the Coordinator of the Visual Arts Program of the German-Mexican Dual Year 2016-2017. In 2018 she was invited to co-curate the exhibition Mexico Textil at the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City. Her research focuses on Mexican textile artesania and contemporary artisanal practices as “ontologies and epistemologies of making,” as systems of knowledge and living that unfold in the daily life of their makers and that can be understood -in parts- as an active response to the political, social and economic circumstances of indigenous communities in Mexico, particularly in relation to the history of colonialism and its afterlives, from national identity politics to neo-liberal state policies. Her current research focuses therefore, on textile practices as communal strategies of resistance, self-determination and persistence, particularly in relation to gender violence and, what Maria Lugones has termed, the coloniality of gender.