Complex Geometries: Creativity, Motif, and the Study of Contemporary Handwoven Cloth from Côte d'Ivoire

Abstract

| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 It began with a business partnership and grew to a research collaboration. In 2014 I met a group of weavers in the village of Waraniéné, Côte d’Ivoire (Fig. 1). Vali Coulibaly, one of the master weavers and president of the village workshop, shared their interest in collaborating with someone who could help market cloth woven at Waraniéné to Global North consumers. Six master craftspeople, an American designer, an Ivorian operations manager, and myself founded a partnership in 2016 as a mechanism for weavers to sell their strip-woven textiles directly to global consumers.1 In 2020, we officially registered the partnership as a nonprofit organization, with the goal of investing all profits in arts-based initiatives ideated and managed by the craftspeople at Waraniéné.2 My role began as a business partner and transitioned, through my developing relationships as well as academic study, toward a scholarly interest in the creativity of contemporary Indigenous handweaving and the global circulation of art objects. This partnership established relationships, mutual trust, and investment that laid the groundwork to foster a successful research dynamic that would have been out of reach in many other fieldwork contexts. My research would not exist without this partnership.3 I am deeply invested and acutely interested in the ways in which weavers’ innovation in motifs and patterns change the reception of West African textiles in the Global North.4 Not only am I able to situate and critique myself—as researcher and partner from the global North—but I am also in a unique position to understand the market dynamics from the perspective of someone who actively engages with the circulation, sale, and consumption of these cloths. In this analysis, I use my role as researcher, scholar, and advocate to consider contemporary handwoven cloth from Waraniéné through the overlapping lenses of scholarly research, curatorial interpretation, connoisseurship, and commerce. I investigate the creative cycle that individual weavers harness through the weaving process by treating textiles as both individual and alternative archives through a practice I call motif mapping. By drawing multiple iterations of handwoven pattern across time, motif mapping identifies and analyzes numerous, seemingly minor designs that contribute to major shifts in the mastery of the Indigenous weaving process. This practice creates a third digital archive that provides a way to see beyond the commercial or connoisseurial focus of global markets and situates these designs within a visual provenance, without recontextualization or categorization. I navigate the vast field of contemporary handwoven cloth circulation, their complex geometric motifs, and weaver creativity through these overlapping sites of investigation, which operate simultaneously and sometimes paradoxically. By focusing on an individual contemporary handwoven cloth industry—Waraniéné—this research seeks to expand upon the existing literature on contemporary West African textiles and unpack researcher positionally as a multidisciplinary approach. This approach examines how the idea of creative ingenuity and local changes are constructed between and among these complex relationships. In doing so, I trace the creative process of master weavers from start to finish to better understand how motif and pattern develop in contemporary contexts. My emphasis on creativity does not negate the immense skill required to weave these cloths but instead foregrounds skill as a requirement of creativity. Creativity cannot be applied and developed without skill in weaving. Motif mapping functions as a way to track the intricate and creative visual appearance of motif elements skillfully woven at Waraniéné from the 1970s to the present. This fifty-year period is pivotal in the shifting consumption of handwoven textiles, giving rise to parallel markets and defining perceptions about Waraniéné’s cloth production up to today. This research is informed by interviews with over thirty master craftspeople from Waraniéné conducted between 2016 and 2022, in addition to study of the literature and archival research in museum and private textile collections throughout Europe, the United States, and Côte d’Ivoire.5