Tejer el Buen Vivir

The support of human life comes from other humans who, in the past, made decisions connected to their environment and thought beyond their own individual existence. Organized communities that understood the passage of time, listened to their territory, and perhaps without explicitly naming it, also imagined future generations. These ways of life are deeply rooted in collective relationships with territory, community, and spirituality. They reaffirm existence not as an individualistic act, but as a self that is connected to a greater whole. Textile creation is situated here as an expression of life itself. Through textile practice, context, culture, territory, community, identity, and memory become intertwined. Spinning, dyeing, and weaving are practices that materialize relationships—with the land, with time, with other people, and with knowledge passed down from generation to generation. 

Drawing from situated experiences in Oaxaca, Mexico, we invite a reflection on buen vivir—not as a separate or abstract concept, but as a way of life. We intend to host Ana Cris Palmeros at Wellesley for several campus events centered on community, the environment, and textile art. Ana Cris is the co-founder and director of Texere, a space dedicated to textile creation, research, and residency programs, where she supports collective learning processes and fosters connections among artisans, artists, and researchers, strengthening community-based textile practices. At Texere, residency artists are invited to join an exchange dinner at the end of their stay to share a skill/idea from their own practice. We're interested in doing the same here at Wellesley, which will bring Wellesley Faculty Member, Kathya Landeros, and Sustainable Textile Artist/Lecturer at Parsons School of Design, Saige Devlin to share their art and reflect on what buen vivir means to their practice.