John Alfredo / Nerio Atauje

Nerio Atauje Gomez was born in Ayacucho in 1958 in a family of weavers. He still remembers weaving on the family loom made of native woods and a bamboo reed. From an early age he was versed in natural dyes and everything related to preparing the materials for the older weavers. At age eleven he could reach the pedals and it was then that he started to weave. From then on, his career as a weaver began until he joined forces with John Alfredo Davis in 1987 revive the eccentric weaves inspired in the colonial and early republican textiles. John Alfredo Davis is a name interwoven in Lima’s history. As John Alfredo takes you around Lima, as one of Aracari´s experts, he modestly mentions his family’s role in the development of the city and buildings designed by two great uncles, street named after several ancestors. The son of two prominent artists, the creative gene clearly runs strong. John Alfredo studied Fine Art and is a designer and artist by trade with a lifelong interest in the revival and promotion of Peruvian traditional arts and textiles. He has curated many exhibitions and written several books and articles about the preservation of Andean traditional art.

John Alfredo’s passion for textiles is clear when he talks about the subject: “To come to Peru without an interest in textiles is to miss out on the most representative elements of Andean cultures”. He affirms. John Alfredo feels a responsibility to promote but also to protect these cultural traditions, saying “Our culture is an asset and we must protect it.” Generally Peruvian Carpets are made by order as production is limited. They are made from cotton warp with 100% wool weft, hand dyed with colour fast reactive dyes.

During the nearly six thousand years of Peruvian textile history, almost all textile techniques have been explored using mostly native cotton and camelid fibers. XVI century chroniclers described the use of textiles to cover the interior of temples and buildings of the Inca elite, also as offerings to the gods in rituals involving the burning of textiles. These were the “compi” textiles reserved for the elite and the realm of the sacred. Compi is the Runa Simi (Quechua) word to describe the technique of eccentric weft and it consists on a weft faced weave that deviates from the horizontal and usual right-angled relation to the warp. It is commonly used in tapestry weave to produce sinuous, curved designs requiring great skill.

The Incas used matts as floor covers made of woven reeds. The conquistadores introduced sheep’s wool, the pedal loom and carpets to dress the floors, an influence from the 781 years of Muslim Umayyad presence in the Iberian Peninsula. Thus, the great talent of the native Peruvian weavers versed in the eccentric weft a technique reserved only for the Inca elite and their deities. The Spaniards were impressed by these textiles so the weavers produced carpets and tapestries for the colonial, Criollo, Hispanics, Native elites in a new style that mixed the influence multiple of cultures, some as distant as the Chinese. Unfortunately, with the arrival of the industrial era the elaborate eccentric weft gradually vanished.