Photo: For women in the Mampuján region of Colombia, quilting has become a form of community-building and a powerful way to tell their story. Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo, Ontario is hosting an exhibit featuring four of the quilts created by the women. 

For the Colombian coastal community of Mampuján, displaced from their land by a paramilitary group in 2000, quilting has become a way of recovering their past in order to weave a better future. First started as a trauma healing project, it quickly grew to encompass the entire community as women gathered together to talk about the pain they had suffered during their displacement.

The women of Mampuján decided to sew the history of their Afro-Colombian community, from life in Africa, to slavery, to agriculture, to displacement and recovery, in a series of tapestries.

For Juana Alicia Ruiz, the project leader, this decision and subsequent learning about their history, was transformational:  “We learned that violence is cyclical. We, in the present, were not the only ones that had been victims. Rather, our ancestors had arrived in Colombia as victims of this violence, and their own displacement from Africa. So we started to tell all of this story, because by telling it, we could work to stop the cycle of violence.”

Moving from individual healing to collective recovery and advocating for their rights have become important steps for Mampuján in changing cycles of violence and creating a better future for their community. In November of 2015, the women of Mampuján won the Colombian National Peace Prize in recognition of their effort.

The MSCU Centre for Peace Advancement at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo, Ontario, is hosting an exhibit, As the Women Sew: Community Quilts of Mamupján, Colombia. The exhibit displays four of the many impactful quilts created by this group, and was made possible by the collaboration of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Colombia and Fundación Puntos de Encuentro. It also includes 10 photographs by MCC worker Anna Vogt that document what life now looks like for those who once lived in Old Mamupján.

The MSCU Centre for Peace Advancement is committed to being a place to craft, record, map, and perform the stories of peacemaking. It is a place to give voice to others. The Grebel Gallery is a welcoming display and exhibit space for visual art and media, for receptions, small workshops and small coffee house/concerts.