Last week we started a new “incarnation” of the
Sewing and Chatting
initiative that we launched more than a year ago as one of the actions we developed around the
Open-roulotte
project. This time, we continue to propose a space in the Can Mas Civic Center where anyone can come to share their knowledge of sewing and learn from what others know, while we chat about aspects of public life in the city; these conversations are recorded to become part of the
Open-roulotte Ràdio
podcasts in the future.
This year we have joined with the
Wild Seamstresses
collective to propose a workshop that starts from the recovery of the life stories of the people who participate in it. A good number of women (significantly only women) from very diverse backgrounds and experiences attended the presentation day of the workshop; some of them with work experience in the textile industry. From these memories,
Ms. Jess
, from Costureras Salvajes, proposes to isolate those motifs that each one finds most relevant to turn them into screen prints that they can then incorporate into their clothing designs as a print.
The workshop aims to share and critically review the experience of these women with sewing: the domestic economy, the precariousness of female work… and to value this everyday creative practice.
It so happens that the Can Mas Civic Center is managed by the Can Mas Neighborhood Association; it is well known that many of these associations, very active in the social and political struggles of the 70s, declined with the “normalization” of official social policies and the delegation to the state by citizens of the management of the cultural and social life of the communities. Although many of those struggles were led by women, it was still men who mostly occupied public positions within the associations, so that once the years of passion had passed, women were again displaced to the domestic sphere completely. This is the case of the Can Mas Neighborhood Association, which translates into the fact that the Civic Center is used most of the time and managed exclusively by the same group of men, already retired -since, as in many others, there has been no generational change in the association either-.
Sewing and chatting
is also a pretext for people who have been excluded from public activity due to gender to appropriate this equipment, which is also public, and have a platform that allows them to take a voice, represent their experience and themselves.