Santiago Útima (1992) is a Colombian fashion practitioner that found through education and art his way to subvert processes of creating fashion. His work critically and poetically addresses the paradoxes and tensions of fashion industrial settings.
Puntadas por Pulgada, Maquila is a performance investigating the paradoxes and tensions between nostalgia and progress. In the performance shown in the video, Útima and his mother Amparo Loaiza encounter the difficulties of sewing an industrialised knit fabric with a domestic sewing machine. Rhythm, time and scale are materialised into the regularity of stitches per inch inside and outside the garments we dress. More than a technology, sewing becomes an experience of time, pressure and technical efficiency.