TEXTILES IN AYACUCHO (140)

16:30, Thursday 28th June, Thaw

The film moves from alpaca sheering at almost 17,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes to a Quechua weaving neighbourhood in the city of Ayacucho. Vignettes of preparing wool, spinning, dying and setting up looms are complemented with a section on textile pattern-making. Although a few words are spoken in Spanish, the audio-design of the film juxtaposes ambient sound and music. No subtitles are provided since the visceral-visual processes of textile preparation are intended to speak for themselves. As such, the work runs counter to word-based vérité, the current preference of ethnographic sound film, and brings the viewer back to a listening eye.