The loom that refused to modernise — and what it taught a generation of weavers
For six summers I watched Rustam Aka tie ten thousand resist-knots by hand. Then his daughter installed a Jacquard machine on the next floor. Neither of them, it turned out, was wrong.
The workshop sits at the end of an unpaved lane behind the Khonatlas factory in Margilan, a town the Soviets once tried to convert entirely to cotton and which, for reasons no economist has ever satisfactorily explained, refused. I first walked into Rustam Akramov's courtyard in the summer of 2018, looking for a single bolt of seven-colour adras. I left, eleven days later, with three notebooks of dye recipes and the distinct sense that I had misunderstood almost everything I thought I kn ew about textiles.
What the abr-band actually is
Abrbandi — literally cloud-binding — is the practice of tying the warp threads in tight bundles, dipping them into one dye, untying selected sections, and dipping again. The fabric is woven only after every yarn has been coloured. The "blur" everyone admires on a finished atlas is not a mistake of the loom. It is the dye registering its disagreement with the knot.
“The Jacquard gives you exactly what you drew. The hand-loom gives you what the dye decided. We need both, and we should stop apologising for either.”
— Madina Akramova, Khonatlas studio