TYPE: wedding Aksu (woman’s wedding overskirt), Tarabuco village area, Bolivia

CIRCA: 1930

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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 (see black and white photo bottom row) 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 various designs in the ‘pallay’ (or patterned area) are woven in complementary-warp weave where the design remains exactly the same front and back except the colours reverse (see comparison photos above).

Of note is that some of the yarns in the narrow outer black strip beside the design strip are woven using the lloque* technique (see lower left and right colour photos), making this a special garment. This is a technique which is generally reserved for high-quality fabrics or special pieces and when alternating rows of lloque Z-twisted yarns with the rest of the garment’s S-twisted yarns results in a herringbone-like effect. This lloque weave bestows, according to shamanic custom, divine protection to its owner. The design panel features a predominate geometric arrangement along with small llamas and horses throughout the design. The interruption of the pattern towards one end in these design panel denotes this textile as a four-selvedge weave, with three of those selvedges edged with a very tight woven-in-place four colour tubular border, or ‘ribete’ (see center photo top row). 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.

*The word ‘lloque’ (pronounced ‘yo-kay’) denotes reverse spun yarns that are not commonly used and are said to contain magical properties which are imbued to the textile. 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 clearly seen in the narrow black edge (colour photos bottom left and right) where strips of the differentiating thread-spin placed beside one another form a herringbone-like pattern  Another example of lloque can be seen in the lower center photo here https://warpandweft.club/portfolio-item/south-america-4/