About “Hanging by a Thread: The Ancient Cotton Fiber Art of Manabí Province, Coastal Ecuador”
TITLE: Hanging by a Thread: The Ancient Cotton Fiber Art of Manabí Province, Coastal Ecuador
Producer/Director: Kathleen Klumpp
Format: HD video, available on DVD, MP4, MOV formats.
Running time: 65:48 minutes
Preparing seed cotton, spinning it with a hand-held spindle, dyeing yarns with vegetable dyes, and weaving bags and hammocks on an indigenous vertical loom is a coastal Ecuadorian fiber art that has been transmitted by peasant women from generation to generation for millennia. Through the lens of the last family of cotton textile practitioners to survive into the 21st century, the author and producer of this video, anthropologist Kathleen Klumpp, documents a rich Andean textile tradition that reaches back to the dawn of weaving in South America. Many of the techniques she shows are unknown to the world of Andean textiles. Beginning in 1976 when she first encountered this family of artisans, she carries the viewer up to the present, giving us a prognosis of the future of this ancient craft in today’s globalized economy.
Anthropologist Kathleen Klumpp deseeding brown cotton.
Beating the cotton into a fluffy sheet of interlocking fibers.
Trinidad spins cotton using a hand-held spindle and with whorl and a three-legged distaff to retain the yarn.
A three-minute trailer of this video may be seen at: http://www.bitly.com/cottonfibertrailer