Between art and craft

The arid Guajira Peninsula is an exotic location located in northern Colombia where the desert meets the Caribbean Ocean. In this land lives the Wayuu tribe of nomads known as the people of the sun, sand and wind. Wayuu are one of the last leaving matrilineal societies where women play the highest role within society and are considered as family and cultural leaders. Due to lack of food and nutrition access for climate variability which threatens their livelihoods and traditional ways of life, women’s handcraft became the main source of income for these tribes. Wayuu women learn how to make bags, called “Susu” in the wayunaiki language, at a young age: they specialize in one of the most complex crochet and textile techniques on our planet. For the Wayuu women, weaving - in both a literal and a metaphorical sense - is the thread that joins families and clans. Mochila bags are intimately linked to Wayuu life and philosophy. They represent a circular cosmology where there is no before and after, but only threads of life spun from one cycle and woven into the next.