Unbekannt

“Dedicated to my wonderful teachers, the weavers of Peru.”

This is how Anni Albers opens her groundbreaking 1965 collection of textiles which she calls “On Weaving”. By this time, she has already been exploring the cultures of the Andes and South and Central America for 30 years. She travels to those regions more than a dozen times with her husband over the years, discovering the art of the local cultures with him. Together, they collect containers and figures, but Albers concentrates on textiles. Overall, over 1400 objects from Mexico, Peru and Costa Rica end up in their possession. Albers probably encounters textiles art from the Andes in the Museum for Ethnology in Berlin in the 1920s. Shetravels to Mexico with her husband for the first time in 1935, visiting the excavations at Monte Albán. Anni Albers soon recognises the vast wealth of innovation in the textile traditions of the indigenous cultures of Latin America, and she begins to study them assiduously.

Among the textiles on show here is a pre-Colombian fragment woven from wool. The pattern is around a thousand years old and goes back to the Chancay culture. The fragment is not poorly preserved; rather, Anni Albers has picked the threads apart to discover exactly how it was created. She explains just how important she sees this kind of article and analysing it:

“Beginning means exploration, selection, development, a potent vitality … not circumscribed by the tried and traditional. I try to take my students on this journey back into early time, to the beginnings of textiles. How did it all begin?”