Cloth of Tongues

Mallorca

I got to Bujosa’s workshop on Mallorca with the eighty layers of Amami still in my head, and the noise took that thought and threw it out the window before I’d even said hello. A hard metallic clatter bounced off the walls. One person was working the looms, wearing ear protection, and I understood why immediately. The looms themselves were old, blunt looking, oversized, more like factory equipment than craft tools. The other person, working the front of the shop, waved me toward the back when they noticed me looking.

A Detour, Sort Of

Before any of that, I’d stopped in Pòrtol, at a small workshop belonging to a potter named Antonia Amengual. Siurells are one of Mallorca’s actual native specialties, small white clay figures with a whistle built into the base, painted in quick strokes of red and green, and I ended up buying several, a dog, a mouse, a donkey with a rider, a rooster, a cow. I skipped the snail. The front room was full of them alongside terracotta plates and bowls the color of the island’s red soil, which I bought a few of too. Nobody was making anything while I was there. A single artisan working alone in the back told me to ring a bell if I needed anything.

Nobody actually knows where the siurell comes from. Ask five people on Mallorca and the answer that comes up most is the Moors, the Islamic rule that shaped much of the island between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. It isn’t a lazy guess. It’s a sign of how deep that layer of the island’s history still sits, close enough to the surface that anything old and unexplained gets folded back into it.

Back to the Thread

Anyway. Ikat, the resist dyeing technique behind what Mallorca calls roba de llengües, cloth of tongues, named for patterns that look like small flames, didn’t originate here, same as kasuri didn’t originate on Amami. Where it gets murkier is everything after that, and the pattern repeats itself: some trace it to Muslim settlers arriving as early as the ninth century, carrying a technique that may have started in Indonesia or Malaysia. Others place the real arrival centuries later, general Silk Road trade in the sixteenth century, or point to the earliest surviving textiles, eighteenth century silk favored by wealthy families. One more theory, almost too tidy to be true, credits French artisans fleeing the Revolution. Unlike kasuri’s fairly agreed upon water route to Amami, ikat’s path to Mallorca has at least four competing stories, and nobody has settled on one.

Workshop at Textil Bujosa

At Bujosa, the dye vats are there. A wall holds rows of old glass bottles and dyed thread in signature colors, each tagged with a small handwritten card, a record of every color the workshop has mixed over the years. The loom doing the actual weaving sits a few feet off, old, loud, clearly built for exactly this one job.

I bought a pouch, a pencil case, and a small backpack, all in the same simple, bold ikat pattern, patches of color that read almost nothing like Oshima Tsumugi. The fabric had a softness to it, natural but with a sturdiness underneath that made it feel like it would outlast the bag it was tucked into. There was a quality table runner I almost bought too. This one was genuinely beautiful. Hand finished along the edges. I put it back, partly because of the price, a bad exchange rate made it feel steeper than it probably was, and partly the practical problem of not having a table in Tokyo that it would actually fit.

Both workshops, Bujosa and the more polished, showroom feeling operation at Vicens in Pollença, share one real constraint with Oshima Tsumugi: the loom width limits what the fabric can become on its own. Vicens didn’t let me onto the working floor, but the showroom doubled as something like a small museum, antique pieces kept alongside the products for sale, decades of the same pattern language sitting side by side. What happens next is where the two traditions stop resembling each other.

Cloth or Space

Oshima Tsumugi exists to become a kimono. Every constraint in its process, the shimebata binding, the eighty layers of mud, the months, sometimes stretching toward a year, of weaving, points toward a single destination, a garment worn on a body. Mallorcan ikat doesn’t seem to have ever been primarily clothing. Bujosa does make a small line of it, so it isn’t entirely absent, but walk through what Bujosa and Vicens actually sell and it’s mostly cushions, curtains, tablecloths, bags, espadrilles, even lounge chairs built for a terrace, things that live in a room or outside one, not fabric waiting to become a robe.

I’d assumed any textile serious enough to be called one of the world’s great traditions must have started on a body and spread outward from there. Walking through what Bujosa and Vicens actually sell, cushions, curtains, tablecloths, lounge chairs, I don’t think that’s true here. Ikat arrived on Mallorca and settled into the room instead of the wardrobe, the terrace instead of the body.

The Question, Answered Halfway

Back in Amami, I left wondering what happens when a technique meets something that never needed that kind of precision to begin with. Bujosa gave me half an answer, though maybe it isn’t really an answer to the same question. Oshima Tsumugi and Mallorcan ikat are just two different things, and the difference in demand isn’t a verdict on either one.

The part of the process that requires judgment, actual human discernment, stayed entirely manual. The dyeing. The part that’s pure repetition, physical labor without much decision making, went to the machine. The weaving. Oshima Tsumugi hasn’t made that same trade, and maybe it shouldn’t, since the weaving there is exactly where the judgment lives. But watching an old power loom do in an afternoon what would take a person days, in a workshop that still refuses to mechanize the one step that actually needs a human hand, something in how I’d been thinking about this shifted.

Two beautiful islands, each with its own landscape, ocean, and tradition. It was never really about speed. It may be about which steps a craft still trusts to a person, and which ones it’s ready to hand over, and who decides that line when the craft itself can’t speak for itself anymore.

FAQ

Q: What is roba de llengües? A: Roba de llengües, “cloth of tongues,” is Mallorca’s traditional ikat textile, woven with a resist dyeing technique in which yarn is dyed before weaving to create bold, flame-like patterns. It developed mostly as a textile for the home rather than for clothing.

Q: Where does Mallorcan ikat come from? A: Its origin isn’t settled. Competing theories point to Muslim settlers arriving as early as the ninth century, general Mediterranean trade along the Silk Road in the sixteenth century, the earliest surviving textiles dating only to the eighteenth century, or French artisans fleeing the Revolution.

Q: Is Mallorcan ikat still handmade? A: Partially. At workshops like Bujosa, the dyeing remains entirely manual, but the weaving is done on power looms, a split between the step that requires human judgment and the step that’s mostly repetition.