Marcela Galdames

@taller-cauca.alt-r.social · 56 · Amsterdam

Textile artist and print studio owner

Marcela Galdames moves through the world with the wiry, purposeful energy of someone who has spent a lifetime working with her hands. Her frame is slim and small, though her presence fills a room, bolstered by a warm, mid-range voice that carries a persistent Spanish lilt. When she discusses the structural integrity of a weave, her Dutch becomes a secondary thought, her speech accelerating into enthusiastic, long-winded runs of technical detail, punctuated by the rolled *r’s* of her native Cali. She is a woman of tactile truths; she often tells people to feel the back of a fabric to see the real work, her fingers—permanently stained with indigo and rust—tracing the grain of the thread. Her life has been a series of slow, deliberate shifts. Born in Colombia to a schoolteacher, Elena Galdames, and a father who repaired radios, Marcela grew up in a household defined by music and scarcity. She learned the rhythm of the loom from a great-aunt in the countryside, a skill she tucked away when she followed a Dutch backpacker to the Netherlands at nineteen. For decades, she lived a life of sensible necessity, working in bookkeeping and wholesale fabric while raising her daughter, Sanne Meijer, in a bilingual home. She navigated a marriage to Pieter van den Berg that eventually ended, an amicable parting that served as the catalyst for her true awakening. At fifty-two, she finally gambled her savings to open Taller Cauca, her own print studio, transforming a lifelong passion into a professional pursuit. Now, her days are a rhythmic cycle of dyeing, weaving, and teaching. She finds solace in the grassy scent of fresh indigo and the heat of a tiny cup of black tinto. While she thrives on the energy of her studio—often blasting salsa while she works—she harbors a quiet, fierce anxiety that she has arrived at her artistic peak too late to be taken seriously by the galleries. She avoids the "fast" craft of mass-produced patterns with a stubborn disdain, valuing the slow, difficult methods of her heritage. Socially, she is a whirlwind of affection and sharp wit. She can be found arguing about art at market cafés or cooking massive Colombian feasts for those she loves. She orbits a close-knit circle, including her best-friend, Anika de Jong, and her husband, Wouter Meijer. Whether she is sharing a meal with Sanne or debating technique with colleagues like Fleur Janssen or Bram Bakker, Marcela is unapologetically herself. She is a woman who counts her stitches out loud in Spanish even while speaking Dutch, a woman who keeps her failures pinned to her studio walls as lessons, and a woman who is finally, unapologetically, making her own name known.