Activities, exhibitions and projects

From October 4 to November 28, 2024

VAINICA. UNDOING AND DOING, a textile co-creation and sustainability project centered on memory, which is being developed throughout 2024 in Granada (Spain) as part of the International Textile Cartographies Project. Its artistic results will be officially presented in the eponymous exhibition at the Exhibition Gallery of the Center for Modern Languages of the University of Granada during October and November 2024, with the publication of a catalog.

Textile Cartographies is a participatory action research project that uses textile arts to tell stories. Coordinated by the Research Group on Arts, Community, and Education (GriArCE) of the APECV - Association of Teachers of Expression and Visual Communication of Portugal, the international project includes 27 working groups in universities, schools, collectives, and NGOs across America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe. The project's objective is to give a voice to minority and peripheral groups, highlighting the lack of visibility and appreciation of textile work related to women throughout history and even today. It also aims to demonstrate the significant potential of textile art to reflect and advocate for various issues related to the environment, climate justice, social justice, and other sustainability challenges.

In the case of Textile Cartographies in Granada (coordinated by María Dolores Gallego, artist and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Granada), the group has been developing its contemporary artistic creation process based on art, textile craftsmanship, and recycling through weekly meetings. These meetings serve as artistic co-creation laboratories and spaces for care, encounter, and reflection. The focus is on deconstructing textile pieces, not destroying them, to create new pieces and re-signify them as genuine Textile Artworks using the loom technique. Hence, the title VAINICA arises as an appropriation of embroidery technique and as a metaphor for the traditional process of undoing and redoing, as well as a reunion with our individual memories and life stories that intertwine to create new 10 x 10 cm textile pieces of collective memories. In parallel, an international call has been launched inviting interested individuals and creators of textile art and crafts to participate in the project and exhibition by creating sustainable textile art pieces following the modus operandi of the local group and sending them to Granada (Spain).

The Textile Cartographies team in Granada includes Amalia Silva Sáez, Ángela Barrera García, Carmen Ruiz de Almirón Lanz, João Galera, and Natalia Luc Rojas. These are various professionals (mostly women) connected in some way to the textile universe, such as contemporary artists, visual arts teachers, researchers, artistic mediators, weavers, and active textile designers, originating from Spain, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.

Thus, this project, both locally and internationally, is characterized by the high number of participating women creators and is linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) due to its strong gender perspective from feminism and its connection to the reuse of textile materials for contemporary creation. Especially concerning Goal Number 5, Gender Equality, it is a transversal objective in the global project as we believe that equality should be a universal right and criterion in education, culture, and both public and private spheres. Therefore, primarily through the project VAINICA. UNDOING AND DOING, the aim is to make women visible as creators of culture, art, and ancestral heritage throughout history, as well as today. Additionally, it seeks to reclaim, through contemporary artistic creation, the crafts and textile techniques linked to women that have been inherited and transmitted from generation to generation within homes and in their precarious and invisible workplaces.

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