Introduction

Welcome to the second chapter of Sketching Stories of Wounds and Wonder. This collection of materials reflects on the role of weaving in Juliastuti’s script-in-the-making. Mirroring the idea of ‘Weaving as an Infrastructure for Protection’, this page is built as a textile of sorts where disparate elements, including books, images, videos and fabrics, are woven together. The video interview at the bottom functions as a compass to navigate the page and engage with its different components.

The idea of looking at weaving as an infrastructure for protection is inspired by the 150 women weavers from the Indigenous people of Mollo who, in 2006, peacefully occupied a mining site on the sacred land around the Mutin mountain in West Timor. For one year they sat there, weaving their traditional cloth, and gathered hundreds of other villagers until they stopped the extraction of marble. As the introduction to the volume Weaving, Guardian of Identity present in the page reads: “All of the women weavers fought to stave off environmental catastrophy – a marble mining company – which they drove out with their looms, using weaving as a weapon” (p. 1). Known as the weaving protests, this movement did not only defy the mining company and the local authorities but also the patriarchal order that regulates the rural societies these women belong to.

Juliastuti came across the movement of the women weavers through her collaborations with Lakoat Kujawas, an alternative school and radical pedagogical project based in West Timor. Together with kindred institutions situated in Indonesia and Timor Leste, Lakoat Kujawas is one of the ‘commons museums’, whose activities underpin the writing of Stories of Wounds and Wonder. Acknowledging the political, environmental, and spiritual power of the women weavers, Nuraini Juliastuti frames weaving not just as a folkloric tradition but as an infrastructure indeed, one that actively safeguards nature, and with it the livelihood of the communities that practice it. The cloths themselves are not just decorative textiles but, as a matter of fact, they are “archives of knowledge and experience” (Weaving, Guardian of Identity, p. 3) that incorporates not only natural resources such as fibres and dyes, but also techniques, wisdoms and cosmologies.