Essay
Camila Vicencio Pérez
Interdisciplinary Institute of Aesthetics, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
Abstract
This essay explores the work of Chilean artist, educator, and researcher Paulina Brugnoli Bailoni, arguing that weaving—slow, deliberate, intimate—activates embodied aesthetic lucidity, memory, and foresight. Tracing three intertwined strands (pedagogy, Andean textile research, and her Epifanías series), it reads her practice through Simondon’s technophany, Rivera Cusicanqui’s ch’ixi, and Andean textile epistemologies, framing Brugnoli’s casa-taller as a taypi of intergenerational care and knowledge. In Chile’s neoliberal aftermath, her work materializes situated feminist futuring: not predictive abstractions, but materially woven alternatives that value slow temporalities, affective bonds, and ancestral memory.
Keywords
Feminist futures, Andean textiles, Technophany, Ch’ixi, Contemporary textile art
Introduction
What can aesthetic thought offer us today in imagining sustainable, affective, and situated futures? This text departs from this question to suggest that the action of weaving: slow, deliberate, and intimate; can activate embodied forms of aesthetic lucidity, memory and foresight.
Focusing on the Chilean artist, professor and researcher Paulina Brugnoli Bailoni (Fig. 1), this article argues that her textile practice constitutes aesthetic thought that subverts modern disciplinary boundaries and articulates critical, affective and situated knowledge. For more than five decades, Brugnoli has woven a trajectory intertwining three dimensions: as an educator establishing a pedagogical lineage in textile arts in Chile; as a researcher of Andean textile traditions working collaboratively with communities; and as an artist whose Epifanías (Epiphanies) series materializes knowledge that inhabits contradictions without resolving them, weaving together the Catholic and the Andean, the intimate and collective, the ancestral and the contemporary.
Fig. 1: Paulina Brugnoli tejiendo Ventana dedicada a Santa Catalina de Siena. Photograph by José Román, ca. 1984. Courtesy of the Paulina Brugnoli Bailoni Archive.
This article traces three intertwined threads of her practice to argue that, taken together, they constitute speculative anticipation: a way of imagining and constructing futures alternative to neoliberalism. These are not abstract futures but materially woven, within the intimacy of the technical gesture and the collective of her casa-taller (home-studio). In the Chilean context—marked by the violent imposition of neoliberalism during the dictatorship and the dismantling of the social fabric—Brugnoli’s work takes on a political dimension. In the face of futures colonized by market logic, efficiency and individualism, her practice upholds forms of knowledge and relation that the modern project has systematically sought to delegitimize: embodied knowledge, slow temporalities, affective bonds and ancestral memories.
Rivera Cusicanqui (2015) and her concept of ch’ixi—a form of knowledge that articulates contradictions without resolving them—helps us understand how Brugnoli inhabits multiple spaces simultaneously: inside and outside Academia, within tradition and contemporality, weaving the personal together with the collective. Simondon (2017) and his notion of technophany—the visibility of the technical gesture as a form of knowledge—illuminate how weaving becomes a mode of embodied thinking.
Arnold and Espejo (2013), with their Andean textile epistemology, remind us that textiles are conceived as living beings that form intimate bonds with those who create them (p. 62), a relationality that grounds Brugnoli’s understanding of knowledge and community. Finally, Milojević’s (2024) understanding of feminism—as the articulation of different values and priorities from those inherited from patriarchal worldviews (p. 46)—illuminates Brugnoli’s practice. Her teaching, research, and artistic work articulate values of relationality, care, and collective knowledge-making in concrete opposition to neoliberal atomization.
This article is part of a broader research project on the genealogies of textile design in Chile, developed from feminist and decolonial perspectives. It also emerges from a personal admiration for the artist, whose trajectory offers unique insights into alternative ways of creating, sustaining, and transmitting community and knowledge. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on feminist futures—demonstrating how textile practices from the Global South constitute valid epistemologies and modes of anticipation that can reshape how Futures Studies understands its scope and possibilities—through an embodied, craft-oriented, and situated perspective.
Epifanías: Sacred Gestures in the Taypi
Brugnoli’s practice as artist cannot be separated from her formation as an educator. Drawn from an early age to artistic creation across multiple disciplines, she developed a relational model of knowledge rooted in her decade-long collaboration with Margarita Johow, professor of Loom Weaving at the University of Chile, who shaped her understanding of pedagogy as generosity, accompaniment, and collective construction. Her motivation, she recalls, was fundamentally collective, and it was during this formative period with Johow that she came to understand weaving as “such a liberating craft that fills you and gives you the possibility to meditate, to learn much more than what you are doing” (Paulina Brugnoli Bailoni, personal communication, October 24, 2025). For Brugnoli, learning emerges from encounter, mutual observation, and shared action—a model that went beyond the strictly academic, sustaining spaces of encounter and transmission even during the dictatorship, when political violence directly affected her family and threatened the social fabric she sought to weave.
Her research practice is equally inseparable from this pedagogical sensibility. Beginning in the 1960s through community textile revitalisation initiatives in rural Chile, and deepening through her collaborative work at the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art alongside Soledad Hoces de la Guardia, Brugnoli developed an understanding of Andean textiles not as inert objects but as living beings—carriers of cosmology, memory, and relational knowledge (Arévalo & De la Maza, 2024). These dimensions—teaching and research—are inseparable in Brugnoli’s practice, each informing and sustaining the other, alongside her artistic work. It is through the Epifanías series, a key example of this artistic practice, that this integral relationship becomes most materially tangible.
Qhipnayra uñtasis sarnaqapxañani: “Looking back and forward (to the future-past) we can walk in the present-future”. This Aymara aphorism, recovered by Rivera Cusicanqui (2015), encapsulates a radically different understanding of time. It is not a dead past we leave behind as we move towards an inexorable future, but a spiral temporality where the past is visible and available before us, while the future—unknown but woven from what we already know—lies behind us.
Brugnoli’s Epifanías series embodies this temporal understanding in material form. Between 1980 and 1990, in a workshop converted from one of the rooms in her home in the commune of Independencia—her casa-taller—Paulina wove seven tapestries that constitute revelations in the deepest sense: manifestations of a knowledge that articulates contradictions without resolving them, weaving together the Catholic and the Andean, the intimate and the collective, the ancestral and the contemporary.
The word epiphany refers to an unexpected revelation in everyday life, a manifestation of the divine in the human. In the Catholic tradition, it celebrates the manifestation of Jesus Christ to the Three Wise Men, the moment when the divine becomes visible. For Brugnoli, as Arévalo and De la Maza (2024) point out, “an epiphany is, in a personal and intimate way, ‘to marvel at the world and not remain in the abyss'” (p. 63). Marvelling at the world implies sensitive openness as a gesture of resistance. In the context of the Chilean dictatorship, this gesture had a political dimension: sustaining the ability to perceive beauty and meaning in the midst of horror.
The seven tapestries that make up this series: Ventana dedicada al Espíritu Santo (Window dedicated to the Holy Spirit), Ventana dedicada a Santa Catalina de Siena (Window dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena), Amor Maíz (Corn Love), Bodas (Weddings), Tinkusitha, Tinku Tapatha, y Sonqo; were woven during a period marked by Brugnoli’s academic and artistic work, but also by the political violence that was sweeping the country. This set of works “were guides that crystallized different revelations, both domestic and spiritual” (Arévalo and De la Maza, 2024, p. 63), and reflect a maturation linked to the artist’s drive to explore new formats, colours, and structures.
The notion that the works functioned as guides is important: they are not representations of revelations already consummated, but rather actively participate in the process of revelation. Weaving becomes a way of knowing, of discovering, of crystallising intuitions that only become comprehensible in the act of doing.
Another aspect that radically distinguishes Brugnoli’s practice is the space in which it takes place. Her casa-taller is neither a private studio nor a public gallery, but what Rivera Cusicanqui (2015) calls taypi: a zone of contact that allows one to “live both inside and outside the capitalist machine, to use and at the same time demolish the instrumental reason that has been born from its bowels” (p. 207). In the Aymara worldview, taypi is the middle space where dialogue and transformation take place: not neutral but charged with power, where opposing forces coexist productively. Brugnoli’s casa-taller functions precisely this way: simultaneously domestic and productive, intimate and collective, private and public.
This space has functioned for decades as a place of meeting, teaching, and celebration; it has witnessed dozens of female textile artists, designers, craftswomen, and apprentices come and go, gathering to weave, share stories and affection, and commemorate the Catholic feast of the Epiphany (Arévalo and De la Maza, 2024, p. 63). This practice of collective celebration in the workplace radically transforms the meaning of artistic production: it is not about an individual artist creating in solitude but rather a community that meets regularly to weave, eat, talk, and celebrate.
The Epifanías series also stands out as the first in which Brugnoli recognised herself as an artist, and as the one that best reflects her interest in Andean weaving, from which she derives her understanding of weaving “as an organ, a body that is symmetrical and complementary by opposition” (Arévalo and De la Maza, 2024, p. 63).
This understanding of fabric as a body, as a three-dimensional organism with its own logic of symmetry and complementarity, seems to stem directly from her study of Andean textiles, where complementary pairs are fundamental to the structuring of the cosmos.
In these epiphanies, then, weaving appears as a way of being sensitive; transparencies, rhythm, colours and textures shape a mode of perception in which the aesthetic and the living are not separated. The body that weaves, the hands that pass the weft, the eyes that evaluate the balance of colours; all participate in the production of a knowledge that cannot be expressed solely in words.
Ch’ixi Thinking: Inhabiting Contradictions
The Epifanías series could materially embody what Rivera Cusicanqui (2015) calls ch’ixi epistemology: “a knowledge that articulates contradictions, towing time in the existing with the subtle ‘weapons’ of the paradoxical, the hidden and forgotten, the ancient and the small” (p. 30).
Ch’ixi, in Aymara, refers to something that both is and is not at the same time. It describes a mottled grey animal, the result of the juxtaposition of tiny black and white spots. From a distance, it appears to be a uniform grey, but up close, the different spots are revealed, coexisting without blending together. It is not a homogeneous mixture, as suggested by the concept of miscegenation, but rather a coexistence of differences that maintain their specificity while composing something new.
This notion allows us to understand Brugnoli’s practice as a way of inhabiting contradictions without needing to resolve them. Her work does not seek to synthesise or overcome oppositions, but rather to make them coexist productively: she is both an artist and a craftswoman; she works from academia and from home; she weaves Catholic iconography with Andean textile structures and understandings; her works are in museums but also hang in her home and in those of her friends. In doing so, she produces knowledge that is at once institutional and situated.
This ability to inhabit multiple spaces simultaneously, without one cancelling out the other, is precisely what allows her practice to function as a taypi, as a border zone where alternatives can be imagined. As Rivera Cusicanqui (2015) explains, this approach allows him to “live both inside and outside the capitalist machine” (p. 207), using its resources (academic institutions, research funds, exhibition circuits), but demolishing its instrumental logic (maintaining knowledge as a common good, privileging relationships over products, valuing non-Western knowledge).
Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2015) critique of modern temporality is particularly relevant here:
The capitalist ideology of modernisation has imposed the notion of ‘linear and empty’ time, while at the same time turning the products of human labour—and labour itself—into objects of fetishistic use […]. This has become an epistemological trap or obstacle, a stumbling block on the path to intercultural understanding. (p. 206)
In contrast to this linear and empty time, Brugnoli’s weaving proposes a different temporality, closer to the Aymara spiral. In the act of weaving, which is slow, repetitive, and cumulative, it resists modern acceleration and proposes alternative rhythms. As Hoces de la Guardia Chellew and Brugnoli Bailoni (2016) had pointed out, in a world obsessed with efficient time management:
Manual labour gives us the opportunity to reconnect with our own being in order to achieve the necessary psychomotor control and thus recapture the quiet time of being alone with ourselves. In turn, practising crafts provides opportunities for exchanging experiences and learning that allow us to revive our deep memories, build shared knowledge, and express dreams and needs shared by the community. (p. 12)
Similarly, as Rivera Cusicanqui (2015) points out, in the Andean context, contradictory elements can be integrated without losing their specificity:
The figure of Christ and various saints and virgins from the Catholic pantheon among the deities invoked by the Aymara Yaitiris indicates that they have been absorbed into the multiplicity of sacred spaces/entities, thus fitting into the Aymara logic of complementarity, supplementation, and dialectical opposition. (pp. 207-208)
Christ, understood in this way, does not cancel out the Andean deities; they coexist in a ch’ixi relationship where each maintains its specificity while enriching each other. This logic operates in Paulina’s Epifanías, where Catholicism coexists with Andean culture without homogenising either tradition. This is not syncretism but dialogue: each tradition maintains its integrity while being transformed in the encounter, simultaneously weaving memory (ancestral techniques, traditional iconographies) and anticipation (new forms, material explorations, possible futures).
Technophany: The Technical Gesture as Knowledge
In El modo de existencia de los objetos técnicos, Simondon (2008) proposes understanding technology as a form of situated knowledge in which craftsmanship embodies processes of individuation. The technical and the aesthetic converge in their capacity to construct worlds and subjects. The technical object is neither neutral nor instrumental but carries knowledge and participates in the constitution of reality. From this perspective, weaving is a complex gesture in which body, material and memory interweave, becoming the bearer of condensed, intelligent and reflective knowledge.
In Paulina Brugnoli’s case, the act of weaving is not mechanical but expressive, with something of ritual and emotional repetition about it. Every technical decision—which fibre to use, which colour, which weave structure, which weft density—is simultaneously an aesthetic, conceptual and emotional choice. The repetition inherent in weaving is not redundancy but a way of accumulating variations and subtleties; each pass of the thread is a form of sensitive thinking, a way of learning through doing.
This dimension can be clearly seen in works such as Ventana dedicada al Espíritu Santo (Fig. 2) from 1984, where fluidity is concentrated above all in its texture. The surfaces created alternate woven strips of white and empty spaces, which are interrupted by barrel-shaped patterns of red and intense purple; a rhythmic modulation that highlights this repetition laden with subtlety. The rhythm is not monotonous but full of variations (Arévalo and De la Maza, 2024, p. 64).
Fig. 2: Ventana dedicada al Espíritu Santo, 1984. Shaft-loom textile with warp bands; colour-woven weft areas. 150 x 120 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Paulina Brugnoli Bailoni Archive.
In this type of work, the technical process is not hidden; it plays a leading role. The texture and structure reveal the gesture and celebrate it—we can see how it was constructed, the order of operations, and where the weaver made decisions. This visibility of the making process is what Simondon (2017) calls technophany in Sobre la técnica: the moment when technique is revealed and can be appreciated aesthetically and culturally (p. 46). In a world that tends to hide technicality, technophany is a gesture of reappropriation of know-how, in which “the object re-enters the citadel of culture through the shortcut of a ritualisation rich in images and symbols” (Simondon, 2017, p. 46). The technical object is no longer merely useful; it carries cultural meaning and participates in community rituals.
Sonqo (Fig. 3), from 1996, exemplifies this technophanic operation: a piece that reconciles technique and sensitivity by making visible the process, gesture and time involved in textile practice. Defined by the artist as a “woven calligram, a handmade poem” (Arévalo & De la Maza, 2024, p. 85), Sonqo must be hung at a distance from the wall so that the projected shadow reveals the full and empty spaces determined by the weft passes. This installation decision is not purely formal: it makes visible the fabric’s three-dimensionality, its quality as a body that occupies space, casts shadows and breathes.
Fig. 3: Sonqo, 1996. Shaft-loom textile with warp bands; plain weave. 80 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the Paulina Brugnoli Bailoni Archive.
The shadow becomes an integral part of the work, revealing aspects of its structure not evident from the front. In the Andean textile tradition studied by Arnold and Espejo (2013), this three-dimensionality is fundamental: the fabric is a volumetric body with an interior and exterior, front and back, each with its own logic (p. 49).
In Sonqo, cool and warm colour ranges coexist—parallel sides introduce solid colours creating calm passages (blues, greens, soft purples), while the centre contains chromatic and textural disorder: “Sonqo is a world of forests and organic material surrounding the central column of the fabric, evoking the heart” (Arévalo & De la Maza, 2024, p. 85).
This description also suggests an understanding of the heart as a living ecosystem—an inner jungle teeming with life. The central column that evokes the heart is surrounded, protected, and nourished by this textile forest. At the same time, the spatial arrangement of the work not only appeals to visual perception but also foregrounds the very mode of the fabric’s production, revealing its gestural and processual nature.
The choice of name is also significant. Sonqo means heart in Quechua, and its use highlights the ch’ixi operation that characterises Brugnoli’s work: weaving together her own practice with the Andean language she has studied, learned and taught for decades. This is not superficial appropriation but situated incorporation, grounded in years of in-depth analysis of Andean textile traditions and an understanding that in this cosmology, the heart and textiles are intimately linked.
Weaving Feminist Futures: Speculative Anticipation from the South
In this light, Paulina Brugnoli’s career directly responds to urgent issues identified by contemporary feminist Futures Studies. As Abdullah (2025) points out: “the dominance of Western-centric perspectives in futures work perpetuates the exclusion of non-Western and minority voices. This narrative control shapes the discourse around the future, often ignoring alternative ways of knowing and imagining it” (p. 42). Brugnoli’s work, rooted in Andean traditions and developed from the Global South for more than five decades, offers precisely a situated, non-Western way of imagining futures.
Her approach constitutes what Abdullah (2025) identifies as essential for feminising future studies: “integrating acknowledgment of indigenous perspectives, cultural respect, and a connection to the land, thus moving beyond traditional feminist discourse to address broader participation” (p. 37). Paulina’s collaborative research with weaving communities, her understanding of Andean textiles as living beings, and her casa-taller as a space for intergenerational encounters, bring this integration to life not only as a theoretical aspiration, but as a concrete practice.
In the Chilean context, marked by the violent imposition of neoliberalism during the dictatorship, Brugnoli’s work takes on a fundamental political dimension. As Al-Noaimi (2025) points out:
Neoliberal futures are always anti-feminist. The projection and promotion of neoliberal futures, particularly in postcolonial contexts […], prioritizing market logic, privatization and individualism, all come at a significant human and ecological cost precisely because neoliberalism shifts the focus away from ‘human-centered futures’. (p. 8)
Faced with this imposition of emotionally impoverished futures, Paulina’s textile practice articulates a concrete response. Her teaching during the dictatorship sustained spaces for encounter when the regime sought to atomise society. Her research values indigenous knowledge that the neoliberal project attempted to erase. Her community of weaving friends keeps alive forms of organisation based on mutual care, not competition. Each of these gestures constitutes what we might call speculative anticipation: not a prediction of the future, but the material construction of alternatives to the neoliberal present.
From this perspective, Brugnoli’s practice embodies the definition of feminism proposed by Milojević (2024):
A social movement, ideology, theory, philosophy, worldview, and a way of life. It is also about women collectively finding their own voice based on their lived experiences. Furthermore, it is about articulating a different set of values and priorities from those inherited from the patriarchal world view. (p. 46)
Its pedagogy articulates precisely this “different set of values”: care over competition, slowness over efficiency, collective construction over individual achievement, and respect for local traditions over the imposition of universalized knowledge. As Milojević (2012) notes, values like “caring, nurturing, nonviolence, support, and empathy with others” need to be “re-valued, re-considered as critically important for the creation of such better world” (p. 63). Teaching, in this frame, transforms how we understand knowledge and value—not as hierarchies of masculine over feminine, but as integrated ways of knowing. Just as a garden requires continuous care, love, and cooperation, so do our collective futures.
Her teaching practice also constitutes a feminist method in the sense proposed by Coleman and Jungnickel (2024):
Feminist methods are rigorously theorized, and the work on feminist research has therefore refused any straightforward distinctions between theory and practice; indeed, work on feminist research might be understood to compose and sit within a space whereby theory is practiced, and practice is theorized. (p. 9)
Paulina Brugnoli’s career as a researcher cannot be separated from her work as a weaver or her teaching. Knowledge emerges from doing, from contact with materials and people.
This understanding of fabric as embodied thought resonates with what Abdullah (2025) identifies as a feminist approach to futures: “bringing the softer side into decision making process, which is not limited to gender but rather represents a balanced way of thinking” (p. 37). Weaving integrates reason and emotion, planning and spontaneity, control and openness. You cannot weave solely with reason or solely with emotion: both are required in constant dialogue.
How does her work function as a practice of futures? Not in the sense of prediction or extrapolation, but as speculative anticipation: the material and affective construction of alternative ways of inhabiting the world that are offered as possibilities. Every time Brugnoli sits down to weave, teaches others, or opens her casa-taller for collective gatherings, she is weaving an alternative future. A future where time is not colonised by efficiency, manual labour has not been displaced, and knowledge is not separated from the body.
Brugnoli looks back: towards pre-Columbian techniques, Andean traditions, the teachings of Margarita Johow; not out of nostalgia, but to move forward with greater clarity. The past is not overcome; it is available as a resource for imagining alternative futures.
Furthermore, Brugnoli’s proposal aligns with what Abdullah (2025) identifies as the commitment of feminist futurists: “reshaping futures work as a practice grounded in inclusivity, equity, and holistic thinking, aligning with Milojević’s vision of a more connected and collaborative future” (p. 36). Their work demonstrates that these are not abstract aspirations but concrete possibilities that can be realised through situated practices: weaving, horizontal pedagogy, collaborative research, and sustaining community spaces for decades.
This recognition could transform how Futures Studies understands its scope and methods. Though diverse non-Western perspectives have been explored, Latin American epistemologies, grounded in Indigenous and popular knowledge traditions, bring distinctive contributions. Brugnoli’s work exemplifies this: she examines both archaeological textile practices and living knowledge systems of contemporary communities. Indigenous and popular traditions in the Americas articulate sophisticated understandings of community, affective relationality, and collective futurity: knowledges that persist and evolve today, rooted in histories that extend before colonialism itself.
By learning from these situated practices and ancestral knowledges, Futures Studies could expand beyond prediction toward documenting and amplifying the alternative futures already being woven in communities throughout the Global South. Herein lies the significance of Brugnoli’s work: her textile practice—spanning creation, pedagogy, and research—legitimizes Indigenous, popular, and contemporary knowledge systems as epistemologies worthy of study. Her artistic practice articulates complex theories about temporality and community; her teaching transmits living knowledge to new generations; her research documents these systems rigorously. Her five decades of practice exemplify a reorientation toward knowledges that have always been there, waiting to reshape how we imagine our collective futures.
Conclusions
This article has examined Paulina Brugnoli’s practice through three dimensions: her pedagogical work, her research with ethnographic and archaeological textiles, and her artistic production. Broadly speaking, the analysis demonstrates that these three dimensions constitute an integral practice of speculative anticipation that responds to the urgencies raised by contemporary feminist Futures Studies.
Brugnoli’s practice points to a form of knowledge production that is at once pedagogical, investigative, and artistic—three dimensions that, taken together, enact a relational and non-extractive logic that challenges dominant models of academic knowledge production. Her relational model of teaching, her collaborative approach to Andean textile research, and her artistic practice share a common logic: knowledge as reciprocity, built in encounter with materials, communities, and traditions rather than extracted from them. This integration is perhaps most visible in her casa-taller, an intergenerational space that embodies values feminist futurists identify as fundamental to more habitable futures: the revaluing of caring, nurturing, empathy, and collaboration (Milojević, 2012, p. 63).
This resonates with longstanding concerns in cultural studies around situated knowledge and the epistemic value of non-Western traditions. Andean textile epistemologies, in particular, offer distinctive contributions: their understanding of time as spiral rather than linear, of objects as relational subjects rather than inert things, and of knowledge as inherently collective—articulated through concepts such as ch’ixi—speak directly to the concerns of feminist Futures Studies. These are not new insights: Indigenous and Andean communities have long understood knowledge, time, and reciprocity in ways that Western academia is only beginning to engage with seriously. Brugnoli’s work does not illustrate these concepts from the outside; it embodies and enacts them across five decades of practice and stands as an invitation to futures thinking to take non-Western epistemologies not as supplements, but as foundational resources.
In this sense, her contribution lies less in what she proposes than in what she demonstrates: that alternative futures are not abstract horizons but concrete, patient, and materially grounded realities, already being woven in workshops, classrooms, and community gatherings across the Global South. The technophany of her artistic work—the visibility of the technical gesture—is perhaps the clearest example of this: a vindication of traditionally feminised knowledge, made tangible in every pass of the weft.
The anticipatory dimension of her work lies in the material construction of alternatives to the neoliberal present. Each meeting, class, collaborative research project, etc., materialises forms of social organisation based on values other than those of capitalism.
Paulina’s work responds directly to Abdullah (2025) and Al-Noaimi’s (2025) calls to decentralise Western perspectives in future studies. Developed from the Global South, in dialogue with Andean traditions, her practice offers epistemologies and methodologies that expand the field of feminist futures beyond Eurocentric frameworks.
Central to this reorientation is a different understanding of temporality: for Brugnoli, the past is not overcome but available as a resource for imagining and constructing alternative futures, grounding her practice as one of speculative anticipation rather than nostalgia.
This research contributes to debates on feminist futures by documenting concrete, long-term practice that materializes the field’s theoretical aspirations. Brugnoli’s five decades of work prove that speculative anticipation requires what she has offered: sustained collaborative practice, affective engagement, and the patient construction of alternatives in everyday spaces. Feminist futures are not distant horizons but tangible realities being woven now, collectively and materially from the Global South. These practices offer epistemologies the field urgently needs. Her work exemplifies a methodology for Futures Studies itself: attending to situated practices that quietly construct alternatives, recognizing that the most transformative futures thinking may exist not in academic discourse but in the patient, collective work of creating different worlds.
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the National Fund for Cultural Development and the Arts (FONDART), Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage, Call 2025, Project ID Folio No. 767827, titled Memorias textiles: genealogía de los oficios textiles y su enseñanza en la Universidad de Chile durante el siglo XX. The author is a member of the project’s research team, which also includes Magdalena Cattan, Thiare Cornejo, Constanza Urrutia, Paula de la Fuente and Paulina Olguín (team members not listed as co-authors of this article). The author is a scholarship recipient of the Master’s in American Aesthetics program at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. The author is grateful to Professors Claudia Lira and Román Domínguez for their guidance on earlier course-based versions of this work; any remaining errors are the author’s own. The author also thanks Paulina Brugnoli Bailoni and Josefina de la Maza for facilitating access to images; figure captions credit the Paulina Brugnoli Bailoni Archive. English language support by Patricia Acevedo Stange. The author additionally used AI-assisted technology to improve English readability and grammar only, under human oversight and control
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