ÑAWI: Weaving Andean Offerings for Reconciliation.
Drop in Weaving Station with Juliana Bedoya

Ñawi, or eye motif, is the characteristic rhombus of the fabrics and offerings produced in many parts of the Andean world that have been present in various communities across the American continent for millennia. Join community-engaged environmental artist Juliana Bedoya to explore these woven sacred geometries and weave small concentric rhomboid designs using locally gathered plant materials considered invasive combined with colourful threads. This is an invitation to engage in this creative practice as an act of reflection about the complex history of the ancestral lands we are on, in reference to participants’ own interwoven territories converging in the so-called town of Cumberland and the Comox Valley at large.

Ñawi, translated as eye, is also used to indicate a place where something sprouts, to look or listen, as well as protection. Understanding this concept as a shoot system from where sprouts happen, or as a place of junction and manifestation, participants will reflect on their place in the cyclical continuity of this land and all our human and more than human kin. The spirit of this workshop emerges as a way to honour the ancestral and traditional keepers of the land and from the artist’s longing to Indigenize our presence in this territory through stewardship, creative expression and cultural significance that can grow our sense of belonging.

Born in the Colombian Andes, Juliana Bedoya is a community-engaged environmental artist who supports individuals and community groups to establish their own cultural significance through skill sharing, including all stages of ethically harvesting and processing raw plant materials for art-making and environmental art practice. Respectfully using ancestral skills and traditional knowledge that navigates across cultures, and mainly working with garden trims or the so-called “invasive plants”, this work also aims to support local ecological restoration that fosters native ecology.