Weaving is not a docile language. It is an ever-expanding field, opening through crossings and falls. In the work of Rosana Escobar (Bogotá, 1991) and Vanessa Gómez (Cali, 1988), fiber unfolds as a living language that oscillates between the wild and the domestic, between chaos and order. The animal and the vegetal intertwine until they blur into one another: matter discloses its mimetic kinships.
The artists approach the material through listening; they attune to its vibration, its resistance, its flexibility, its rhythm. Fiber does not submit: it is accompanied. Escobar works with chromatic intensity and contrast, creating patterns that evoke thorns, braids, and horse tails. Gómez gravitates toward subtle gestures that destabilize, where a single thread is enough to alter the cadence. Both embrace intuition as paradox: within the stable structure of the warp, they allow space for the unstable to emerge.
There is a clear awareness of the legacy that links textiles to the feminine and the domestic, yet the artists do not aim to deny it but to resignify it. Weaving is not a subordinate craft; it is a form of material and symbolic thought capable of generating both image and discourse. In the hands of Escobar and Gómez, warp and weft become conceptual as much as plastic supports, spaces where the memory of labor intersects with the tensions of territory. Textile affirms itself as an expanded language that bears its historical weight while simultaneously opening time.
Fibers gathered from rural landscapes and urban environments hold within them artisanal and industrial practices, memories of the communal, the Indigenous, and the peasant. In each material there pulses a harvested time, a social experience, a memory: straw as the shelter of the páramo, horsehair as a vestige of the untamed, fique passing through peasant hands before reaching the studio, yaré extracted in the Orinoquía, chiqui chiqui salvaged from brooms in local markets, cortaderia carried in a gesture of reverse colonization. Through this passage the work reveals itself in constant transformation, one piece leading to the next, one inquiry germinating into another. Control negotiates with malleability, and artisanal craft expands into art until it overflows its boundaries.
In this dialogue, what is tied does not close off; it sustains. Knots, braids, and bindings are gestures of care that allow the wild to preserve its defiance. It is the coexistence of the heterogeneous that does not dissolve, that keeps alive the tension between the untamed and the domesticated. Within this tension, between order and chaos, between the subtle and the evident, Escobar and Gómez weave a shared territory. The limit ceases to be a border and becomes an opening. As in every harvest, what is gathered is sown again, and time is woven anew.
