Houses and Blouses

Week 30: Notes

Patterns and ornaments on houses or garments can be more than just repeated lines, shapes and colours. In many traditional societies the painted, woven or embroidered symbols pass on traditional knowledge.

Esther Mahlangu, a South African artist from the Ndebele nation, paints large, colourful abstract paintings on house walls, referencing the clothing and jewellery designs of her people. Guatemaltecan Lidia Lopez explains the design elements embroidered on Mayan huipiles. Hand-woven on a back strap loom, a huipil is a traditional garment worn by indigenous women from central Mexico to Central America and dates back to well before the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas. In Rajasthan in India the women also paint their mud houses. Mud is an exemplary building material for a circular economy because is re-usable and it has been re-discovered by contemporary architects. The Akan people of Ghana were the creators of the Adinkra symbols which are printed on fabric, pottery and walls. Apart from their decorative function, they often convey traditional wisdom about everyday life. Women in West African Burkina Faso’s community Tiébélé paint the walls of their houses in black and white, the former a mixture from graphite and water, the latter made from soap stone. The designs can be religious symbols or refer to their day-to-day life. Barbara Teller Ornelas is a US American master weaver, a member the Navajo People or Dinè as they prefer to be called. She tells the story of the Spider Woman, who instructed Dinè women how to build a loom and taught them to weave. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia in 2011. For these rooms curator Navina Haydar Haykel, art historian Nadia Erzeni and designer and landscape architect Achva Benzinberg Stein commissioned the Moroccan craftsman Adil Navi to build a Morrocan court for the museum with a team of experts. The last film in this programme brings together contemporary architecture and fashion in Bolivia during the presidency of Eva Morales (2006 to 2019), the country’s first indigenous leader.