How can digital textiles embody testimonies of reconciliation?

Abstract

Despite the importance of reconciliation in Colombia as a process that citizens practice actively in their everyday lives, most research has deployed a top-down approach to this concept. In this paper, we question these trends and show how design can play a careful role in destabilizing this approach, allowing the emergence of several embodied and uncertain temporalities as well as situated meanings related to reconciliation. To accomplish this, we focus on an interdisciplinary research project that promotes co-creation spaces with four communities that use textile crafting as ways to narrate conflict and its aftermath, to re-think how they feel reconciliation in their daily life. Nurtured by theories of speculative thinking and ethnographies of the future, this research created a living lab that gathered university students and experts from the social sciences and textile and digital crafts, to think-with digital textile materialities about the feelings of reconciliation.