A rare project brings together graphic designers and Mexico's traditional rug-makers.

By Akiko Busch
May 2001





Above top: Traditional Zapotec weavers in Oaxaca, Mexico, made rugs based on drawings provided by an international group of graphic designers. Above, Steff Geissbuhler and the weaver who realized his design pose with the finished product.
Above bottom: Carin Goldberg's design.

Offsite:
Rugs can be ordered through Juan Montes Lara at stmn-ayt @rocketmail.com or by writing to the weavers directly: Tejedores de Tapetes, Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, C.P. 704020, Mexico.

Collaborations between designers and craftspeople go back to the Bauhaus, but a recent partnership between an international consortium of graphic designers and a community of weavers in Oaxaca, Mexico, suggests a more festive union. Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), founded in Paris in 1951, is a prestigious association of graphic designers that, among other things, intends to "provide friendship, mutual respect, the enjoyment of the company of the like-minded, and even reassurance in the face of a skeptical world." Despite the group's elite invitation-only membership, friendship marked AGI's annual congress held last October in Oaxaca; it was a celebration not only of designers and artisans but of ethnicity, culture, and technology.

To promote the event's theme of diversity, Mexican AGI member German Montalvo invited designers to submit a small sketch or drawing to the Zapotec weavers in the village of Teotitlán del Valle, a community renowned for its textile tradition. The weavers prepared and dyed wool, then wove each design into a 3-by-5-foot rug. When the designers arrived in Teotitlán del Valle, they found their 80-some rugs displayed on the village square in front of an ancient church. While a local band played and small children performed the community's ritual feather dance, weavers and designers met. "The variety of designs and colors was just astounding," says Steff Geissbuhler, then president of AGI/USA. "We celebrated with a meal the village served on the plaza, accompanied by shots of mescal and tequila out of hollowed bamboo sticks."

Hallucinatory alcohol notwithstanding, a sound financial arrangement was at work. The graphic artists have agreed to donate their designs to the crafts community, allowing the weavers permanent rights to sell rugs with their patterns. The rugs, now available directly from the weavers, are as festive as the event. Traditional Oaxacan rugs are characterized by strong motifs, figurative silhouettes, and geometric designs. Not surprisingly, the designs that recognize the graphic sensibility of Zapotec tradition are the most successful, such as Tom Geismar's typographic layout, Geissbuhler's vivid tropical checkerboard, Carin Goldberg's amorphic shapes and dots, and Nancy Skolos's abstract composition of fioating squares.

The weavers benefited from gaining the reproduction rights to the designs, and they have offered something significant in return. Many of these designs were generated on computer; when rendered in wool, the tactile quality gives a new substance and dimension to the electronic sketches. "The thing that impressed and surprised me most was the amount of time it took the artisans to weave the rugs," says Skolos, who runs Skolos-Wedell Design and Photography, in Charlestown, Massachusetts. "It only took half an hour to draw it on the computer, but it took two weeks to weave it. It made me realize how far removed the computer had placed me in relation to the physical world." Thus the weave of these beautiful rugs also spelled out a lesson plan for designers in the digital age.


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