Constanza Camila Kramer

Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias is a Chilean Munich-based artist who has dedicated herself to textiles. The critical examination of the medium 'textile' is as much in the foreground as the reflection of her origins. With previous works such as „HYPERISM“ (2019), she has dealt with the history of her ancestors, the native people living in Chile called Mapuche, to show the importance of their 'culture' and their cosmological knowledge. She has also studied theories of postcolonialism and has developed artistic methods to deconstruct colonial structures in textiles. She intends to take the subject of textiles to the limits of its form by combining handicraft and industrial techniques. Her main concern here is to transform the traditional perception of textiles in society and use the textile as a genre on its own in the visual arts. ​ Kramer Garfias holds a Master of Arts degree in Textiles from the Burg Giebichenstein University in Germany. In 2017 and 2018, she travelled to Japan to live with and learn from Japanese dyeing masters about traditional and ancient techniques on how to create natural colours with plants. In her Munich laboratory, she experiments with fabrics on her handlooms, analyses traditional Japanese dyeing methods to apply this knowledge to her dyes, grows dye plants such as Indigo and Woad, and develops Jacquard fabrics with manufacturers in Como/Italy. Due to her interest in combining her artistic work with philosophical theories, she started to study Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich in October 2020. For a jacquard-artwork from the HYPERISM (2019) project, she received one of four Honorable Mention Awards from the International KOGEI Award, and was exhibited in the Arts and Design Museum of Toyama/Japan.