K R A M E R  G A R F I A S

Do you consider yourself a weaver?

CCKG: Yes, I call myself a weaver. Even though I make most of my artwork using industrial machines, all the knowledge and experience I put into my Jacquards come from my technical weaving training. You can not learn how to use weaving machines without a solid understanding of weaves. Only when you have internalised the technique, the next step can be taken. But apart from the technology, I also feel very connected to the community in the weaving craft and would like to bring this spirit to the outside world.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias engages textile as a medium of aesthetic and epistemic inquiry. Her practice draws on the historical, technological and political dimensions of weaving to examine how knowledge systems, visual authority, and cultural hierarchies are materially encoded.

Rooted in a conceptual approach to textile and informed by her diasporic Chilean background, she works with hand and machine-based image production, using the loom as a space of both structure and tension. Weaving becomes a form of critical writing—resistant to closure, layered with multiplicity, and grounded in process.

Her works engage with visual languages of cartography, iconography, and mythology to investigate how colonial narratives have shaped territories and imaginaries. Through reconfigurations of historical maps and archival imagery, she makes space for alternate spatial imaginaries and speculative counter-histories to emerge—not as reconstructions, but as proposals for different readings.

Influenced by relational philosophies found in various South American cosmologies, her work is informed by a deep engagement with concepts of cyclical time, interdependence, and territorial memory. Rather than referencing fixed traditions, she draws from these logics to expand the political and poetic potential of textile as a medium.

Across series and formats, her woven images foreground instability, layering, and interference as generative principles. The textile surface becomes a dynamic field of negotiation—between history and body, language and material, perception and unlearning.

"00067-02-500", 2019 Photo by Florian Seidel, Munich

Honorable Mentions Award at KOGEI Award Toyama, Japan