Purple - Dyeing at a snail's pace
In Mexico, the colour purple is still obtained from sea snails even today. "Purpura Pansa" is the name of these endangered colour-givers. On the rocky Pacific coast of Oaxaca they are tracked down by experienced dyers, who then dye their hand-spun cotton directly on site. A long-lost form of natural dyeing.
Purple is the colour of wealth and power; cardinals and emperors wore it, and Cleopatra too is said to have loved purple. Watching the Mexican dyers, you quickly understand why it was once such an exclusive and expensive colour. To dye a single skein of cotton purple, up to 300 sea snails are needed. Tracking them down is a dangerous undertaking - only at low tide can the dyers find them in hard-to-reach rock crevices. The purple snails are threatened with extinction, even though in Mexico a particularly 'animal-friendly' method of dyeing is used, one that has survived there for centuries. The dyers coax the precious dye out of the snails directly on site and then let them live on.
It seems like magic: it takes about 10 minutes for the colour purple to develop out of the almost colourless secretion that the snail squirts out after being suitably stimulated. At first the wool onto which the natural dye is applied turns light green, then slightly blue and finally violet. The colour reaction takes place in the open air, without any further aid - only strong sunlight is needed. The experts call this direct dyeing.
Marta Turok, an American anthropologist living in Mexico City, campaigned to have the "Purpura Pansa" placed under protection. Today only 24 men have the official permission of the Mexican government to dye in the bays around the holiday resort of Huatulco. They have to observe certain rules. For example, they dye only with fully grown sea snails larger than 3 cm. And after milking them, the experienced dyers wait until the next new moon before doing so again.
The dyers are Mixtec from the village of Pinotepa, 200 km away in the interior of the country. For centuries the men have come to the coast once a year to dye. But now less and less often - the yield is too small, and dyeing is no longer worthwhile for them. And the ever more numerous luxurious hotels for tourists block their access. Spending the night on the beach as they used to is now unthinkable.
Even today the men dye the hand-spun wool above all for their wives, who weave wrap skirts from it, their traditional garment. For this the women use a very simple loom made of seven pieces of wood and fastened with a strap that they place around their hips - the so-called backstrap loom.
Just like purple dyeing, this kind of weaving has a centuries-long tradition. The purple threads alternate with red and blue tones in a precisely fixed order. The red threads are dyed with the dried blood of cochineal insects, the blue ones with indigo. Every village has its own pattern. But more and more often, here too, no natural colours are used but synthetically produced ones.
The film shows these little-known dyeing and weaving techniques for the first and perhaps also the last time. It is uncertain whether next winter there will still be enough purple snails, and whether the dyers will once again set out on the long journey to the coast to dye their hand-spun cotton yarn. Despite all the laws protecting the purple snails, their stocks have declined sharply.