In her modest home in Guapopolo, east of Ecuador’s capital, Ligia Ipiales carefully separates the threads from her horse’s tail and weaves a mesh as fine as gauze for a “cedazo,” a traditional survival sieve.The craftsmanship that once made the village famous is now in decline. Only nine “cedacero” craftsmen remain. The youngest is 51-year-old Guido Paucar, the only male in the group, while the eldest is 76-year-old Ipiales.“This is the identity of our village. If it disappears, Guangopolo loses part of it,” said Baucar. “We are the last generation to make these sieves.”Paucar recalls that fifty years ago, about 500 Aboriginal families made a living by making and selling sieves, selling up to 600 sieves a month for prices ranging from $6 to $30 depending on size. But the advent of cheaper plastic sieves and synthetic fibers meant that sieves were reduced to displaying artefacts that did not exist in everyday life. “Now we only sell 10 at most a week,” he added.Local records show that Guangopolo’s 1,500 residents have been weaving sieves for 200 years. Each sieve is crafted like a drum, with a 15cm (6in) high thin wooden rim that holds traditional ponytail fabric. Until the turn of the last century, these tools were indispensable in Ecuadorian kitchens, where they were mainly used to sift flour.Industrial growth and environmental changes have made it increasingly difficult to obtain horse hair and wood from the native Pumamaqui tree.Until recently, horses were an integral partner in agricultural work in the Andes. However, today farmers prefer motorcycles and tractors. This shift forced artisans to look elsewhere, making southern Colombia and central Ecuador the main sources of horse hair. But the material comes with a hefty price tag, about $1,000 for 100 pounds (about 45 kilograms).After cleaning and drying, the horsehair is sorted by length and stretched onto a simple wooden frame called a “guanga”. Craftsmen sit cross-legged on the floor and, at speeds that make their fingers a blur, select, stretch and knot individual threads to form intricate grids.Making cedazos once provided women with extra income and sometimes helped pay for their children’s education.At the El Cerda Cerro craft center, home to Guagopolo’s last remaining weavers, efforts to train a new generation through workshops and courses have repeatedly failed.“From the age of six or seven, our mothers taught us how to weave sieves,” said Leonor Cuje, 57, pointing to a table covered with sieves, bracelets and brushes made of horse hair. “Now that they’re professionals, they don’t want to do it anymore.”
