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
Documentary photographer and textile researcher
Based in Barcelona, Spain
amayadeyavorsky@yahoo.fr
@amayady
Available for documentary commissions, research collaborations, artist residencies, and exhibitions.
Amaya De Yavorsky is a French-Venezuelan documentary photographer and textile researcher based in Barcelona, Spain. Through long-term fieldwork, photography, and material research, her practice explores the relationships between textiles, landscape, and the knowledge embedded within making.
In 2024, while completing her BA in Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, she initiated Buried Colors, an ongoing documentary project investigating earth- and mud-based dyeing traditions across different cultural and ecological contexts. The project combines photography with immersive research, documenting not only textile processes but also the environments, materials, and everyday practices that shape them. The photographs submitted to the Textile Exchange Photography Award were produced during fieldwork in Thailand and Indonesia in 2025.
Alongside Buried Colors, she has undertaken independent textile research in Chile, Laos, Thailand, and Uzbekistan, documenting local practices through photography, interviews, and material investigation. A six-month period of study with Studio Naenna in Chiang Mai further informed her understanding of natural dyes, weaving traditions, and community-based textile production.
Working across photography and research, Amaya is interested in how images can reveal the relationships between people, place, and material knowledge. Her work contributes to contemporary conversations surrounding regenerative textile practices, cultural continuity, and the role of documentary photography as a form of long-term research.
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
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 Rìos 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 an uso.
Putting together the yarn
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 Rìos 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 an uso.
Putting together the yarn