The Government Delegation will respond this Friday in A Coruña with ‘Bordado contra a violencia’ a combative action of Mexican feminist platforms against feminicides that occur in this American country and in countries around it. It will be through a collective lesson that will be directed by Bea Lema, illustrator and creator from Córdoba, and that will bring together anonymous people to dialogue and reflect on the violence suffered by women around the world and reflect in the fabric the fruit of this reflection. The activity already has the places exhausted.
With this workshop, the Delegation brings to Galicia the action carried out by the collectives ‘Boramos feminicidios’ and ‘Fuentes Rojas’, which, since there have been more than ten years, carry out collective embroidery actions under the premise, ‘a victim, a cloth’, to turn around the concept of embroidery as an act linked to the traditional role of woman in the house and which is carried out in silence.
Thus, the embroidery is transformed into a collective dialogue, in which the people who participate dialogue and reflect loudly on the violence, on the women attacked and transfer the fruit of this reflection to the fabric and thread.
With these actions, feminist groups create safe spaces for women in Mexico to reflect and express their personal experiences with machismo and, also, to denounce situations of personal violence. Sometimes, some of the participants gave an account of their personal situation of violence by knowing and embroidering the stories that talk about how men treated the women who later, finally, murdered. In fact, many of the cloths reflect the names of murdered women, so that the participants also give voice and memory to those deceased women.
An initiative extended to everyone
The initiative of ‘Bordar feminicides’ was born in Mexico There are more than ten years in front of a reality that spoke of nine women on average killed a day in this country, according to UN Women data.
Soon, this idea took hold in other countries around the world, such as Peru, Canada, or South Africa, where more organizations use the needle and thread to denounce violence against women. In Argentina, the collective ‘Weaving feminisms’ created in 2019 the world’s largest feminist flag with contributions from women from different countries. In Uruguay, the ‘Needle Wool Union’, this year made thousands of flags for Women’s Day through the initiative ‘My feminist balcony’; in Spain, the cultural association ‘Hilando Muertos’, also carries out this type of collaborative art actions to claim equality and diversity. At the international level, organizations such as the Common Threads Project use embroidery and sewing as a tool to recover victims of sexual violence in conflict or trafficking situations.