The wool route

Daniel Felipe Jiménez Rojas 

Colombia

The wool route is a social cartography designed with rural and urban artisans in the municipality of Nobsa, known for its large production of traditional wool fabrics. Its purpose was to locate, with the help of the artisans themselves, those masters possessing historical and traditional knowledge that would allow the visualization of the identity elements and the traditional artisanal processes linked to the wool production chain. 

From the field work, visual, sound and oral information was collected on the tradition of wool work, which was materialized in this visual production. The script addressed four categories of study: the processes, by exposing the states of wool as raw material that becomes a product, the tools and the operations of each artisan workshop; the tradition, by describing the knowledge and the ways of teaching-learning; the Identity, by recognizing the particularities of the objects produced; and finally, the territory, which presented the meanings that Nobsa and its wool fabrics have for the community of artisan weavers. 

The cartography presents 14 artisans from the rural zone and 17 from the urban zone, organized in two tours, whose route map was built from the location references provided by the artisans themselves so that the viewer can locate their artisan workshops. This tour is accompanied by an area shot that locates each house-workshop and iconographically exposes the techniques they develop, and then narrate sections of the craft in the voice of the master artisans themselves.