LMRM x FTBTIA X River Coello
In early 2024, For the Birds Trapped in Airports connected LMRM with author Rive Coello to discuss a potential collaboration. The idea was for LMRM to design a handwoven book cloth for the special edition of HAMPI, River’s award-winning poetry book.
At LMRM, we designed a gradient silk warp that incorporated thematic colors for HAMPI. Our approach to the concept was to weave three covers side by side with the hummingbird motif and the tattered "background" positioned in different areas of the gradient so that no one cover is woven the same. Leaning into the idea of change and movement, the movement of the weft yarn across the warp width of these three covers entangles each of the birds and their composition, but renders each of them in very different ways. With the nature of something handwoven, despite the threads being mapped via a digital file, we felt this process would speak to the special edition book cover as an object that is transmutable and varied each time it materializes.
Feb 2025 - March 2026
Special Edition: HAMPI by River Coello
With bookends of a lunar calling and an earthly reminder, HAMPI chronicles a fantastical journey of recovering one’s buried parts to embrace the blessings of ancestral medicine. Concocted between the United States, Ecuador, and Peru, its photography captures the beauty of these heart homes. Its writing in English, Spanish, and Quechua features lessons from sacred guides, gone ancestors, and other loved ones on the journey to a fuller kind of bravery.
River Coello is a Guayaquil-born cultural weaver based in Orlando. They are proudly Andean, kariwarmi, and disabled.
This Special Edition is made in collaboration between For The Birds Trapped in Airports and LMRM, who created the weaving that FTBIA converted to bookcloth for the cover, as well as headbands, and a bookmark ribbon. In an edition of 15, each book has a uniquely woven cover and is encased in a foil stamped clamshell box.
HAMPI book cloth
Gradient silk warp designed and wound by Murat Ahmed.
Composition designed and woven by Hope Wang.
Woven on the TC2 4W loom using double back beams for double weave. Warp 1 using 60/2 silk, Warp 2 using 30/2, weft using 60/2 silk and 30/2.
Photographs by Matt Austin, Hope Wang, and Khalid Ibrahim