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ABOUT
Linguento, Los Lagos, Chile - April 2025
Stayed at Frida’s home to learn about Mapuche textiles, cultures, and the stories carried by her family and community.
Ban Nayang, Laos - July 2024
Volunteering in a Tai Lue village in the middle of Laos at Ban Lua Handicrafts
learning their cotton process and textile traditions.
Volunteering in a Tai Lue village in the middle of Laos at Ban Lua Handicrafts
learning their cotton process and textile traditions.
Food court in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2023
Camera obscura, Eindhoven, Netherlands, 2022
Cheese made with wild thistle
A glimpse into a future where ancestral knowledge nourishes us after the collapse of industrial food.
Chiñol cuisine
Using Chinese eggplants as a speculative culinary encounter woven
through cultural currents and inherited change
Using Chinese eggplants as a speculative culinary encounter woven
through cultural currents and inherited change
CONTACT
amayadeyavorsky@yahoo.fr
@amayady
Designer and researcher working at the intersection of textiles, storytelling, and cultural preservation. Rooted in hands-on fieldwork, my practice blends photography, material experimentation, and anthropological inquiry to explore and preserve textile traditions.
EDUCATION
Design Academy Eindhoven, NL
BA Design
2021-2026
Instituto Europeo de Diseño (IED) Barcelona, Spain
BA Fashion Design with Westminster
Full ride 3 years merit scholarship
2020-2021
Fabricademy, Barcelona, Spain
Transdisciplianry course at the intersection between textiles, digital fabrication and biology
2019-2020
ARTIST STATEMENT
I work with textiles as a way to explore memory, material culture, and ancestral knowledge. For me, weaving, dyeing, and making are not just techniques, they are languages that carry histories, identities, and relationships between people and land. Rooted in hands-on learning, I immerse myself in the places where traditions originate, engaging directly with the materials, environments, and communities that sustain them.
Raised between cultures and countries, I see borders as fluid. Thanks to my mother’s work in aviation, I’ve been traveling my whole life. This constant movement shaped my way of seeing: I’ve never felt tied to one place, but instead developed a deep sensitivity to cultural diversity and nuance. My mother, a fashion designer passionate about traditional textiles, and my father, a photographer, both profoundly influenced my path. From an early age, I was surrounded by fabric, cameras, and stories, seeds that continue to grow in my work today.
Photography is an essential part of my process. It allows me to slow down, to notice what is often overlooked, and to create space for others’ stories to emerge. I don’t use it as a passive documentation tool, but as a form of presence, focusing on gestures, textures, and rhythms that reveal deeper narratives.
My research sits at the intersection of art, design, and anthropology. I am not an observer from the outside, but a learner, guided by curiosity, care, and respect. For me, textile traditions are not relics of the past, but active, adaptable practices that continue to hold meaning in the present.
In a world of increasing standardization and disconnection, I seek out the fragile, the handmade, the land-based, and the intimate, where meaning is spun, dyed, and woven into every thread.
I am a French-Venezuelan designer and researcher based in Barcelona, currently in my final year of Bachelor at Design Academy Eindhoven. My practice explores the intersections of craft and cultural memory, often through direct collaboration with artisans and communities across Latin America and Asia.Growing up in a multicultural family, born in London and having lived in seven countries during my childhood, I have traveled extensively throughout my life, thanks to my mother’s career in aviation. This constant movement and exposure to diverse cultures have deeply shaped my perspective as a designer and fostered a profound respect for craft traditions. My interest in visual storytelling began early, influenced by my father, a photographer, and my mother, a fashion designer.In recent years, I’ve conducted hands-on research with artisans in Chile, Thailand, Laos, and Uzbekistan. Through photography and visual storytelling, I document endangered textile practices within their broader cultural and environmental contexts.I approach research and creation as intertwined processes, rooted in slowness, listening, and mutual respect. My current projects focus on ancestral dyeing and weaving techniques, emphasizing land-based knowledge and oral transmission. I use design as a lens to amplify local voices and preserve craft lineages at risk of being forgotten.
Textiles Mapuches
This textile travel is part of my ongoing research into ancestral textile practices as vessels of cultural memory and resilience. My work explores textiles as living languages, expressions of identity, history, and belonging that sustain deep connections between people, land, and time. Rooted in fieldwork, I combine photography, storytelling, and hands-on learning to engage with practices increasingly at risk of disappearance.In Linguento, a rural village in the Los Ríos region of southern Chile, I spent several days with Frida, a Mapuche artisan and shepherd who carries the weaving knowledge of her mother and grandmother. She lives and works alone on her small farm and though her time to weave is limited, she sells her work at the local market every other day, her loom sits in her bedroom, where she weaves whenever she can.Frida’s practice reflects an intimate relationship with her environment. I learned how she harvests and prepares wool from her own sheep, how the quality of the fiber changes depending on where it grows on the animal, and how she uses local plants for dyeing, which are harvested from her garden and gathered according to the lunar cycle, following cosmological rhythms. She shared one motifs passed down orally, explaining how each one holds personal and cultural meaning.What struck me was the gap left by colonial disruption: many artisans today lack access to ancestral knowledge. Frida, who learned through oral transmission, now looks to books and online sources to fill in the silences. In her Ruka, she stores natural pigments, a hand-drawn family tree, and sticky notes with Mapudungun words, fragments of a language she is determined not to forget.The Mapuche, one of the largest Indidenous groups in South America, were violently displaced and silenced during colonization. Their language was banned, their lands taken, and their culture systematically suppressed. Frida’s weaving, like her quiet repetition of Mapudungun, is an act of resistance and remembrance. I documented the process through photography and notes, focusing on gestures, materials, and the everyday intimacy of making.This project centers on the evolving life of materials and the fragile, embodied knowledge they carry, holding space for stories often overlooked, yet vital to cultural continuity.
Location: Linguento, San Jose de Mariquina, Los Rios, Chile
- Recolectando hojas de maqui, el arbol sagrado para teñir -
- Collecting maqui leaves, the sacred tree for dyeing -
- Preparando el kütral (fuego) para teñir -
- Preparing the kütral (fire) for the dyes -
FOOD INSIGHTS DURING MY STAY
Mapuche seeds: beans, corns
Frida’s sopaipillas, made with dough like bread
Exchanging recipes: Teaching how to make arepas, staple dish from Venezuela
(Desconozco su nombre)
Bolitas de papas dulce en leche caliente
- Rayas unas papas.
-
Apretas con tus manos hasta hacer varios bollitos.
- Las cocinas en leche con azucar hasta que los bollitos de vuelven de una textura blandita y pegajosa.
Mapuche Dessert Recipe – from Frida’s family, passed down from her mother to her, and from her to her daughter
(I don’t know the name).
Sweet Potato Balls in Warm Milk
-
Grate some sweet potatoes.
- Squeeze them with your hands and form several small balls.
- Cook them in milk with sugar until the balls become soft and sticky in texture.
Witrü, large wooden spoon for stirring the dyes.
Chilean toaster
Encimera de la ornilla donde se hace de todo. Tinte y churrasco cocinandose juntos.
Countertop by the stove where everything happens. Dyeing and grilling happening side by side.
Traditional Textile Ustensils
- Haciendo madejas de lana con una Aspa -
- Making madejas wool yarn with an Aspa -
- Making madejas wool yarn with an Aspa -
Madejas de lana: los 2 de arriba son mios, el de abajo es de Frida
Wool yarn: the 2 at the top are mine, the one at the bottom is Frida’s
Making the yarn in the traditional Mapuche’s way using a fuipe
Putting together the yarn