Vivienne Barry\u2019s Como alitas del chincol<\/em><\/a> (2002)<\/a> is an animated documentary that dramatizes the contradictory roles of the arpilleristas <\/em>as women engaged in both domestic craft and political subversion. A tribute to the quilters who survived and documented Pinochet\u2019s dictatorship in Chile, Barry\u2019s film does not present these textile objects as mere historical artifacts but animates them in order to demonstrate how these materials, so often relegated to the feminine and decorative, become powerful and subversive testimony (Furniss 2017, pp. 415\u201316).<\/p>\n Figure 1. Women rolling yarn into a ball. Como alitas del Chincol, 2002 (4:07)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Como alitas del chincol <\/em>can be read as an expression of what Jennifer Lynde Barker calls \u201cfuzzy modernism\u201d; a textile-based mode of stop-motion animation in which soft materials are used self-consciously to rethink the relation between objects, bodies, and historical reality (Barker 2021, p. 4). An aesthetic of animation characterized by softness, texture, ambiguity, and metamorphosis, fabric and string are not limited to mundane materiality. Rather, they are free to establish a different relationship with reality. The liveliness of patches and dolls points to the instability of the world and its potential futures (Ibid.). Instead of showing a documentary-style reconstruction of Pinochet\u2019s dictatorship, Barry presents the country through the very materials that have been most associated with women\u2019s domestic labor: fabric, felt, dolls, and photographs.<\/p>\n Figure 2. People wait in line outside a clinic as a soldier watches them. A sign reads \u201cno hay leche.\u201d (\u201cNo milk,\u201d 4:28)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n This quilted world is deliberately brilliant and colorful, contrasting with the harsh reality of its subject matter. In one sequence, the sun rises as the camera pulls back to reveal a city laid out in a series of patches, with no attempt at conventional perspective. Domesticity is on display as women roll yarn, wash clothing, hang laundry, care for children, and serve food to their community. Yet drab-colored soldiers are ever present, standing outside buildings like the Denmark Embassy (3:46), or policing a line of people as they stand outside a clinic (4:28).<\/p>\n Figure 3. A couple lie dead on the street while a pair of soldiers prepare to execute a third woman. The scene becomes unbearable; a church crowd covers their eyes. Como alitas del Chincol, 2002 (5:05)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The most disturbing scene occurs outside a church. Bodies litter the street as soldiers execute a woman (4:57). A sign reads \u201cMartires de Lonqu\u00e9n<\/em>,\u201d (martyrs of Lonqu\u00e9n) referring to a small town in which twenty-one people went missing in 1973, their bodies remaining undiscovered until 1979 (Moya-Raggio 1984, p.282 fn.4). Here, memory and reality interweave. While the bodies went missing for years, the death of their doll facsimiles are witnessed both by the audience and the onlookers in the church. Bright, patterned, and cheerful fabric conveys hunger, terror, and death. Scenes of state violence are interspersed with quotidian domesticity, in which women take on the mundane tasks of the everyday, sustaining the lives of themselves and those in their community in the process. Instead of tempering the horrors of the dictatorship, Barry\u2019s handmade \u201ccozy\u201d aesthetic makes them all the more disturbing because it forces the viewer to recognize how state violence penetrated those quotidian spaces, and how such mundane acts become methods of resisting oppression.<\/p>\n Figure 4. A group of people find shelter in a church. Como alitas del Chincol, 2002 (2:48)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This is also exactly how the arpilleras <\/em>worked: burlap-backed, appliqu\u00e9d, embroidered wall hangings were made from colorful scraps of fabric and inexpensive thread. Before the dictatorship, this kind of fiber art often depicted pastoral scenes of daily life (McCracken as cited by Ortiz-Vilarelle 2022, p.29). Under Pinochet, however, these quilts became a method of subverting censorship and disseminating visual testimony of resistance (Ibid.). Women appliqu\u00e9d photographs of the missing, used scraps cut from the clothing of lost loved ones, and embroidered messages into their works to record important names and dates. In this regard, Barry\u2019s use of fabric and dolls is very much part of this tradition. When a sign hanging from a church reads \u201c\u00bfD\u00f3nde est\u00e1n<\/em>?\u201d (Where are they?), the film makes visible the arpillera\u2019s <\/em>function as a public memorial to the disappeared.<\/p>\n Figure 5. Photo of a woman\u2019s hands sewing a colorful scene onto a patch of fabric. Como alitas del Chincol, 2002 (7:09)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Handmade animation invites viewers to recognize the labor and construction behind the animated image (Ruddell and Ward, 2019, p.2). Barry extends this idea beyond individual authorship. Later in the film, the scenes of fabric give way to photographs of women\u2019s hands, before finally revealing the faces of the women themselves as they craft these arpilleras<\/em> (7:09). From the animated materials, to hands, to women\u2019s faces, this development shifts the notion of \u201cthe hand of the artist\u201d to a politics of feminist collectivity. The film insists that history has not simply been written by singular authors from official institutions but collectively stitched by women whose labor was relegated to mere domestic trifles.<\/p>\n That invisibility is part of the contradiction Barry dramatizes. Women\u2019s craft has often been devalued because it is associated with decoration, comfort, and the home. Women\u2019s animation and domestic craft have frequently been dismissed as less serious than supposedly more political or national topics (Barker 2021, p.1). Discussions of craft have long been entangled with problematic assumptions about gender and with the patriarchal marginalization of women\u2019s creative labor (Ruddell and Ward 2019, p.6). Yet Barry\u2019s film highlights how the very qualities used to diminish women\u2019s work make the documentation of state horror possible.<\/p>\n The dictatorship\u2019s own response confirms the political danger of this work. In Barry\u2019s film, newspapers describe the tapestries as subversive, seditious, and anti-Chilean (5:23). These headlines reveal that the state did not perceive the arpilleras <\/em>as harmless craft once their testimony began to circulate. Arpilleras <\/em>allowed women to use domesticity to position themselves as social and political actors in the resistance; their underestimated voices of dissent suddenly became a threat to Pinochet\u2019s hegemony (Ortiz-Vilarelle 2022, p.47). Softness transforms into political force. While other artforms were censored or destroyed, the arpilleras <\/em>could move through channels unavailable to more direct forms of protest. But because they testified to disappearance, hunger, and repression, they also became objects of censorship and policing.<\/p>\n Como alitas del chincol<\/em> therefore revises reality by refusing the terms through which dictatorship defines what counts as history. Barry does not provide us with an authoritative account of Pinochet\u2019s Chile. She gives us scraps, dolls, photographs, songs and hands holding needles and thread. In doing so, she shows that the handmade and the cozy can articulate horror precisely because they belong to the intimate spaces where oppression is a lived experience. If fuzzy modernism reveals the \u201cmetamorphic potential of the world of objects,\u201d Barry politicizes that potential, showing how everyday textiles can be transformed from signs of domestic labor into fragile but persistent instruments of hope under fascism (Barker 2021, p. 4). The film\u2019s feminist force lies in this contradiction; the materials of care become materials of resistance.<\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Barker, Jennifer Lynde. \u201cCrafting Animation: Herm\u00edna T\u00fdrlov\u00e1\u2019s Fuzzy Modernism.\u201d MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture<\/em>, 13 Dec. 2021, www.maifeminism.com\/crafting-animation-hermina-tyrlova-fuzzy-modernism<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.animationstudies.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Picture1-300x225.png\")
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