Leidy Viviana Mantilla comes from Saravena (Arauca) with bags and hats that twenty female heads of household have woven with recycled bags. Ancestral embroidery that decants the patience of crochet and cross stitch that reached refinement with the plastic bags that these women recover from everyday garbage. Unique pieces of Colombian crafts that were exhibited at the Exportable Crafts Fair (Farex) this January 2022 in Cartagena. Embroidery forged in suspense at dawn of assault and uncertainty or sleepless nights, after days and nights of armed conflict in the region. They, like the women of Mampuján (Bolívar), weave memory to heal the wounds of war.
Unique pieces of Colombian crafts that were exhibited at the Exportable Crafts Fair (Farex) this January 2022.
Luis Eduardo Herran – El Universal.
Through the conversation with Leidy Viviana, I enter the patio and the house of Dolly Dolores Rivera, who that same bright January morning knits in Saravena, but yearns to get to know Cartagena de Indias, a city she has only seen on postcards or on television. She sometimes dreams of seeing the sea. Leidy Viviana is surprised to see how her embroidery touched the hearts of Cartagena and attendees at the international fair. From the solitude of the light of Saravena, Dolly, whose real name is Dolores de Socorro Rivera Pulgarín, says that when she began to weave, the people who saw her told her: “Weaving bags with garbage bags? She is wasting her time!” Her bags, flowers, earrings, hats and landscapes achieve a beauty out of grace and the patience of his hands, with the same light with which the yellows that bloom in Saravena explode.
(Enter the special: United Colombia, where differences can live).
In position 119 of the Cartagena de Indias fair, the name with which Leidy Viviana baptized her work and artistic endeavor is surprising: Maraka, and explains that it is a word that in the Muisca language has several meanings: Ma is mother earth. Ara are the guardian birds of the tongue on earth, the parrots. Aka is the kingdom of the celestial. Maraka or capachos is a good luck charm, it is bliss, but every word is the conjunction and harmony between heaven and earth. These twenty women, some young, mothers who are heads of households and elderly women, are also joined by young people from the region who want to follow the path of weaving and people with motor disabilities. There are deaf people who, thanks to this group, learned to read lips and weave.
Maraka was born in 2014. The recycling store closed during the pandemic, but its obstinate and exemplary work did not cease. Wilson Mantilla, father of Leidy Viviana, is from Santander and met Omaira Mendoza, a llanera, as a hospital porter. The two tireless entrepreneurs are surprised that their daughter has positioned the region with an art derived from recycling. “My parents used to laugh when they saw me encourage and promote women weavers. They thought I had gone crazy, but I fulfilled the wishes of my grandmothers, Dolly and countless women from my land. Rufino Mantilla, Leidy’s grandfather, opened the route to Arauca from Santander. A key woman is Dolly Rivera, who, at 80 years old, weaves with the same passion in the living room and workshop of her house, under the light of the yellow flower of the plain.
Leidy Viviana Mantilla has been a finalist twice for the Green Award in Latin America.
Luis Eduardo Herran – El Universal.
After living experiences of orphanhood and destabilization, Leidy Viviana undertook a journey through Peru and Chile and crossed the cardinal points of hope and loneliness until she felt the call of her land. She then found, at last, the light in her own village, together with her family and the legion of women weavers. Seeds in exchange for bags. This is how this brave woman participated with Maraka in the World Entrepreneurship Forum and in the circular economy meeting, in Récord Colombia in 2021. It has been a finalist twice for the Green Award in Latin America. Her intervention on how to promote entrepreneurship through women and her experiences of how to give new uses to waste are lessons for the future that show results in a department that does not heal its wounds from the war.
He goes around his town and everywhere, handing out trees and seeds in exchange for garbage bags. In Cartagena, she went to the Bazurto Market to buy guacals, and was petrified when she saw the sick pelicans eating carrion together with the buzzards. “I have traveled through Latin America and I have never seen a similar problem of contamination like the one I have seen in the middle of the Cartagena de Indias market,” she says with moist eyes. “It is a very sad image of a city as beautiful as this.” Leidy Viviana has been surprised because everyone who came to her position at Farex asked her to stand up to meet someone from Saravena, Arauca. They have embarked on a long journey to show what a group of women is capable of creating to change the ill-advised course of war and social and human misunderstandings.
GUSTAVO TATIS WAR
The universal
United Colombia
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