CIRCA: 1930
This impressive Aymaran aksu, or women’s over-skirt, comes from the Tarabuco village area in the Department of Chuquisaca, Bolivia and is an essential part of the traditional ceremonial ensemble of the women of that region. This particularly fine piece is a so-called ‘wedding aksu’, that is it was made specifically for, and worn on, a woman’s marriage day. Woven on the vertical axis, it is worn on the horizontal axis cinched at the waist by a belt and has a broad hem of elaborate designs. It is constructed using camelid fibers in the warped-faced weave technique with the black ‘pampa’ (plain ground area) in warp-faced plain weave while the ‘pallay’ (or design area) is woven using a mixture of camelid fibres and white cotton in complementary-warp weave where the design remains exactly the same front and back except the colours reverse (see lower center comparison photo middle row).
The design panel features a predominate geometric arrangement along with small llamas and horses throughout. The interruption of the pattern towards one end in these design panel denotes this textile as a four-selvedge weave, with three of those selvedge’s edged with a woven-in-place four colour tubular border, or ‘ribete’ (right photo bottom row). Of note is that the yarns in the narrow outer black strip beside the design strip are woven using the lloque* technique, something that is not commonly used and hence makes this a special garment, as according to shamanic custom this lloque weave bestows divine protection to its owner. The size is 86cm x 112cm, it was made circa 1930 and was collected in Bolivia in the 1970’s with only the one owner since. It is in excellent condition with no repairs or reweaves.
*The word ‘lloque’ (pronounced ‘yo-kay’) denotes reverse spun yarns. That is, the lloque yarns are S-spun and Z-plied – i.e. in the anti-clockwise direction – as opposed to the rest of the textile which is Z-spun and S-plied, i.e. the clockwise direction, which is the normal spin direction for Aymara weaving in general. This reversal of the normal spin can be seen in the narrow black edge where strips of the differentiating thread-spin placed beside one another form a herringbone-like pattern (left and center photos bottom row}. Another example of lloque can be seen in the bottom left and right photos here https://warpandweft.club/portfolio-item/south-america-11/