Kingston Creative in collaboration with the Embassy of Colombia in Jamaica introduces the work of Virgelina Chará, Colombian human rights defender and reparations advocate

Virgelina Chará – Colombian Textile Artist and Human Rights Defender

For over eight (8) decades, Art therapy has been accepted across the world as a means of processing traumatic experiences and providing some relief for victims. In Jamaica, some visual artists and organisations have explored Art Therapy as a viable means for healing and this has been true in the Caribbean, including Colombia. On October 19, 2023, Virgelina Chará, Colombian human rights defender and reparations advocate shared with a group of visual artists, advocates and storytellers how she uses textiles to help trauma victims process and heal from their experiences.

This gathering of like-minds took place at the Kingston Creative Hub in Downtown Kingston, in collaboration with the Embassy of Colombia in Jamaica and Kingston Creative as a preamble to Healing Through Textile Arts workshops to be facilitated by Mrs. Chará in 2024 with Jamaican artists.

Virgelina Chará is a Colombian human rights defender and reparations advocate and led the “Costurero de la Memoria” (Sewing Room for Memory) which is a women run project that focuses on victims of the Colombian internal conflict to promote the recuperation of memories from the victim’s point of view as a reparation exercise cutting across different ethnic groups, regions of Colombia and genders. She is an internal refugee in Colombia who preserves the tradition of weaving of afro descendant women in Colombia and fights for the empowerment of women and marginalised communities. In some cases, the finished products represent political statements from victims in their cry for repatriation.

Virgelina Chará explains how Colombian refugees created this specific textile art as a political statement to government officials to take note of their challenges and as a means of Art Therapy to process their different experiences. Photo by: Stuart Reeves

The Artist Talk at the Kingston Creative Hub was attended by The Colombian Ambassador to Jamaica, Mrs. Emiliana Bernard Stephenson, Andrés Pérez-Rodríguez, First Secretary / Head of the Consular Section at the Embassy of Colombia in Jamaica, students from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts (EMCVPA) textile department, a lecturer from the EMCVPA textile and fiber arts, storytellers and Visual Arts who use art for healing. The interactive discussions allowed guests to interrogate the artwork presented by Mrs. Chará in the context of the work done in Jamaica and how we can incorporate more healing through arts initiatives and activities in our communities via different art forms, including textile arts.