Stories

Gaby Greenlee (AYAL Art and Art History) received a 2023 Project Development Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to go towards developing her work based on her dissertation, Inka Borders and the Power of Volatility: at the Fringes and Edges of Textile and Territory. Gaby's research focuses on the Inka state and how Inka visual culture was used to express their relationship to the land. In its claim to power, the Inka empire relied on a narrative of rootedness in the landscape and embedded relational practices to propel their ideology and to expand territorially. The ACLS project grant contributes to Gaby's ongoing research concerning how the Inkas used elite textiles within this narrative, visualizing how they understood themselves in relation to others and their surroundings, as expressed in cloth. Textiles conceptualized spatially and materially insider-outsider relations across different categories, for example in matters of kinship, warfare, and spiritual belief. In the different spatial and scale aspects that their textile artifacts convey --for example, from the structures of their woven fabrics to the surface and design aspects of the same--the Inkas articulated how they may have seen and experienced their territorial space and, more particularly, their territorial border areas in a manner that underscored a relational understanding of the Andean world.