Alejandra Ballón Gutiérrez

The ghetto of Cantagallo (Lima) is home to the Amazonian community Shipibo-Conibo. Its culture is ancestral and mostly known for weaving technique called Kené. Through a peer-to-peer learning process with women based in Catagallo, Alejandra Ballón Gutiérrez started learning aesthetic patrons of geometrical abstraction found in the Kené weaving and in their culture and teaching her three associates occidental methodologies related to postmodernism and conceptual art.

The fellowship supports the Research Center and Graphic Studio Shibipo-Conibo, a not-for-profit cultural association of Amazonian design patterns, that gathers artefacts, textiles, murals and drawings, produced in the cultural exchange with local communities. Through a practice-based anthropology, the centre aims at rescuing the ancient forms, as well as the modern and contemporary ones in order to understand the evolution of the communities decoded on the graphics and colorimetry studies.

Collected in the catalogue of Amazonian design, each pattern includes the graphic, the historical, the technical and the cultural references associated to the design. This project aims at being the primary source of aesthetic information on Shipibo culture. Its goal is to help depreciated and discriminated communities to know, recognize and appreciate the philosophical and economical value of their art as this can help reshape their political condition.

In the frame of AFIELD mentorship programs from 2018 to 2020, Alejandra Ballon Guttierez became the mentor of About A Worker in 2018, a social enterprise based in France and intiated by fashion designer Kim Hou and Paul Boulenger.