Lina Celis, architect (from Universidad de Los Andes) and textile master (from Parsons School of Design) with honors. She is interested in an ethical practice that embraces multidisciplinarity and explores the concept of “conscious inhabiting.” Lina translates collective memories into inhabitable pieces using recovered fique, a natural fiber from Colombia, and domestic materials. She was a finalist in the Dorothy Waxman Textile Prize 2022, the CFDA Scholarship Fund 2022, and the Design For the Future Award 2023. Lina is currently working on The Mycelium House project with AIANY and is also part of the Colectivo de Palabreo.
A refuge for settling in MFA Textiles thesis project New York, United States
“Montaña” explores the profound connection between our sense of identity and the landscape where we grew up. Though in the Andes Mountains, it depicts how the feeling of home remains with us even as we move away, not out of homesickness, but as a means to reconnect with our roots. By settling in, we revive the conscious way our ancestors inhabited the earth, bridging the past and the future. “Montaña” is like a handheld “hogar,” a skin that allows us to belong and feel connected, much like the “ruana,” a square piece of Colombian textile, does for us.
Through this compounded space, we can inhabit the entire cosmos, from its soul or ‘fuego’ (murca) to its delicate envelope or ‘casa’ (ca). Drawing on an ancestral understanding of settling down, ‘Montaña’ symbolizes a reinterpretation of ‘moxigua’, which was ‘the home of the people’ in the Muisca language. It explores the uncertainty of belonging in a mixed-origin context, but it doesn’t aim to provide answers. Instead, ‘Montaña’ is a piece that celebrates the experience of being alive.”
Fique is explored in multiple ways; it is reclaimed, unraveled, and dyed with natural pigments to dance inside an act of creation. It can be crocheted, felted, woven, or used for basketry, with inner memories encapsulated in scoby skins. This performance is like an alchemist and a herbarium, allowing us to settle down and reconcile with Mother Earth.
Jardín
Creciente
Making connections with our domesticity in growth
New York, United States
This textile garden is meant to provide a sense of home that connects us to our identity and offers an open refuge for transformation and belonging. It’s a space that changes with us as we grow, and embodies the essence of a life cycle with its breaths, scents, and sensations that make it feel like home. Jardín Creciente invites you to consider how we can cultivate a sense of home in our lives right now, through a caregiver perspective, as it’s an integral part of our evolving identity.
The story behind this creation is embodied in fique, a natural fiber sourced from recycled Colombian coffee bags, with origins tracing back to the Guanes Indigenous community. While this plant-based fiber is now used for commonplace goods, it evokes a sense of home despite the urban setting of New York City.
By experimenting with different techniques, the fique is meticulously processed to be unraveled, naturally dyed, felted, and woven into baskets using crochet and embroidery methods. This approach breathes life into ordinary moments and reimagines the spaces we inhabit.
“Memoria de una pérdida”
delves deep into a journey of complex emotions and memories from everyday life, which stems from a personal experience of losing someone and intersects with the collective memory of the La Violencia period in Colombia. Through materializing memories into flourishing garden pieces, it presents a tribute to a loved one who was once by our side.
Memoria de una Pérdida
A space for being vulnerable
New York, United States
This piece holds a space for individuals to gather and reconnect through their shared experiences of loss and void. Using diverse textile explorations, it embodies intangible manifestations that allow for a deeper connection with one’s own experience of loss. Together, these individual stories and shared memories intersect and weave a fabric of emotions.
Wisdom Pot
arts & crafts from Dastkar
Ranthambore to New York
for ECONYL x Parsons School of Design
New York, United States
This piece represents Dastkar Ranthambore multiple techniques that they have used over the years, but also it symbolizes introduction of innovative arts and crafts such as recycled and recovered fibers like Econyl, bioplastics and mycelium. Wisdom pot integrates five main textiles procesess: crochet, basketry, knitting, felting and natural dye by using Econyl as the source of everything, making visible infinite possibilities of closed loop inside of Indian arts and crafts clusters.
Atardecer de Páramo
an ethical capsule collection of skin from nature
Natural dyes capsule
Bogota, Colombia
This capsule collection is inspired by Colombian paramos’ sunsets, which color our skin with delicate and warm colors. It’s created of three basic pieces, a pant, a coat, and a t-shirt which can be adapted in many different ways to diverse bodies and genders.
All pieces are made by hand by artisans and seamstresses with raw materials such as organic cotton and hemp fiber, also with recycled fabrics of cotton and plastic. On the other hand, each piece was colored with natural dyeing from local flowers and fruits to create a unique and environmentally sustainable capsule collection.
MAIZ 1
Biographical textiles through the lens of corn
participatory crochet workshop exhibition with Colectivo de Palabreo
New York, United States
M A I Z; biographical textiles through the lens of corn is a sensory experience that explores how our bodies account for notions of land, belonging, and domesticity. Through interaction with corn, we explore its diversity of settings that has been utilized as a medium of identity in Latinx communities.
Rather than a dietary good, M A I Z understands corn as part of our everyday life stories, becoming a primary actor within the network that makes possible our shared existence. Therefore, through the handy transformation of individuals, such as artisans, primarily women, the LatinAmerican grounded species has historically been an act of resistance, a tool of recognition, and a medium of knowledge. In this way, this experience and corn itself becomes a translator’s medium for the different Latinx communities residing in the US. dinner and workshop table
tissue of corn into something elsesomething more than itself. As a result of this experience, corn will cease to mean only food and rather, it will become a centerpiece in cultivating the Latinx identity and a device of resistance
Bacon & Cheese
the lens of corn
By bringing corn to our quotidian table, we want to question and convey physical barriers of identity and belonging as an act of immaterial resilience. Therefore, we propose a provocative dinner table using discarded corn husk that explores diverse artisanal practices such as crochet, basketry, and sewing, interconnected with the performance of making and eating.
In this way, M A I Z, looks to enable and trigger conversations around the corn to foster discussions, negotiations, and sharing of personal stories that account for cultural, environmental, and communal entanglements.
