TEXTILES AS MOVEMENT AND TERRITORY
A short film shot in Subachoque, Colombia.
We created this short film as a way to open a dialogue between textiles, the body, and the territory that shapes us.
There is a long tradition of understanding textiles as objects that remain still. They hang, they lie flat, they define a room by virtue of their presence in it. At VERDI, we have always believed that the logic of weaving, the decision about tension, rhythm, and structure, carries within it an energy that static display can only partially reveal.
Textiles as Movement and Territory began from a question: what happens when the textile is asked to move?
Shot on location in the open highlands of Subachoque, the project brought together twenty performers and a series of large-scale handwoven panels produced in our Bogotá atelier. The panels, woven in yaré with copper threads, two materials that carry between them the weight of landscape and labor, were designed not as backdrops but as protagonists. Objects with mass, with surface, with a specific relationship to the light and wind of an open field. The performers carried them, stretched them, turned them into forms that shifted with every step, every turn, every collective decision made in motion.
Yaré is a fiber with its own history in the Colombian territory: tough, expressive, resistant. Woven alongside copper, it produces a surface that is simultaneously warm and structural, organic and precise. In the landscape of Subachoque, under an open sky and against deep green hillsides, these qualities read differently than they do in any interior. The fiber becomes geography. The weave becomes terrain.
What emerged in the film was neither performance nor fashion in the conventional sense. It was something closer to a study in material presence: in what a textile reveals when it is released from the wall and given to the body, to choreography, and to open air. Under the direction of Tomás Vera, with choreography by Federico Bautista, the movements developed a logic that mirrored the logic of weaving itself. Repetition, tension, release. The body as loom. The landscape as the warp.
The same intelligence runs through the fashion pieces shown alongside the large-scale panels. The bags featured in this project, woven in gold-toned copper threads in our distinctive pineapple and seashell weaves, are built from the same material understanding: each knot a decision, each surface a record of the hours and hands that produced it. Carried against the landscape of Subachoque, they read not as accessories but as extensions of the same textile thinking, objects that belong to the territory as much as to the wardrobe.
At VERDI, the movement between scales has always been natural. A rug and a mochila share a material language. A windowcovering and a clutch speak to the same understanding of fiber, light, and structure. Textiles as Movement and Territory makes that continuity visible: in motion, outdoors, at the scale of the landscape itself.
The textile, freed from the room, becomes something else entirely. It becomes event.
CREDITS
CREATIVE DIRECTION
Tomás Vera
CREATIVE TEAM
Samuel Santamaría
Gabriela Mejía
Juan David Rodríguez
VIDEO
Brimer Pérez
Juan Pablo Diaz
Aura Ramirez
PHOTOGRAPHY
Tomás Vera
Juan Pablo Diaz
Mariana Rojas
CHOREOGRAPHY
Federico Bautista
PERFORMERS
Anthony Castañeda Puentes
Beidy Natalia Cañon Cortes
Carol Daniela Baron Varela
Catalina Mosquera Mejía
Daniela Espitia Leguizamón
Daniela Vargas Hurtado
Elizabeth Orozco
Gustavo Alejandro Vega Castañeda
Ivonne Melissa Samacá Romero
Jhon Sebastián Paredes Cruz
Jillian Katterin Pérez Castro
Juana Valentina Nieto García
Juanita Silva Guzmán
Laura Alejandra Cortes Ovalle
Luis Alejandro Guerrero Ávila
Luna Sofia Pineda Gil
Natalia Vanessa Parra Alvear
Paula Sofia Gomez Mojica
Valentina Alvernia Herrera
Valentina García Niño
