Leonardo Hidalgo Uribe

Geographies of Memory and Nostalgia

Dialogue between storytelling and industrial textile production

This project features The Meditation of my Father, which tells the story of Leonardo’s grandfather, Álvaro, who struggles with expressing care and affection and yet can do it timidly. The story of Álvaro is expressed in a set of four woven fabrics that use simple geometrical patterns distorted into soft curves by using cotton yarn qualities and stone washing as finishings.

This project explores world-building practices as methods for a creative direction involving storytelling in creating textile collections for woven fabrics. Inspired by literary fiction based on family histories, Leonardo Hidalgo Uribe interviewed his mother and grandparents, who lived together in the same house in Bogotá. Together with their memories, he collected stories of his great-grandparents and the diverse regions around Colombia gathered into the walls, rooms, and gardens of Hidalgo Uribe’s mother’s home. Their anecdotes were collected into an atlas composed of written stories and imagery that set the tone and mood of different worlds created in each story. Hidalgo Uribe translated these narratives into woven fabrics that built together a collection that jumps between worlds that describe particular characters, places, or moments in time.

This exhibition features the collection The meditation of my father, which tells the story of Hildago Uribe’s grandfather, Álvaro, who struggles with expressing care and affection and yet can do it timidly. In collaboration with a Turkish mill, Vanelli, Leonardo Hidalgo Uribe created a series of interior fabrics which play around the tension between the rigidity of his grandfather and the softness and delicacy of his words. This was expressed by composing simple geometrical patterns distorted into soft curves by using cotton yarns and stone washing as finishings.