From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Aymara
This article documents Aymara-tradition adaptations of Beach Surgery. For other Andean forms, see Andean weaving adaptations, Peruvian retablo interpretations.
The Aymara people's interpretation of Beach Surgery through vertical loom weaving — an ancient Andean tradition rooted in Tawantinsuyu cosmological symbolism. Unlike retablo sculpture or pan-Andean textile retellings, Aymara adaptations centre the vertical loom itself as narrative apparatus: Leif and Katita emerge from thread-direction and colour-shift rather than figuration.
The most documented work is Liqi Churaña (The Weaving Returns) — a 2019 installation across five vertical looms in La Paz, created by the Collective of the Spiralling Thread . Each loom stages one chapter. The first three (Newcastle) use bright red thread in diagonal opposition to black and white, representing the cycle; the final three (the interior) introduce the one-sided coin motif as an impossible weave — red thread returning to itself without reversal, mapping Katita's insistence that the cycle must reverse.
Crucially, the Aymara cosmological pairing of complementary opposites (ch'ixi — the coexistence of irreconcilable things) mirrors the glitch's structural impossibility: two halves that cannot weave together. Growing pressure is rendered as thread-tension; the wings as a sudden shift to vertical threads that break the loom's frame entirely. The unweaving becomes the story.