The Government Delegation and the illustrator Bea Lema replicate in Galicia with ‘Bordado contra la Violencia’ the initiative of Mexican groups to give voice to the victims of male violence

The Government Delegation, together with the illustrator Bea Lema, replicated today in A Coruña with ‘Bordado contra la violencia’ the combative action that was born within the Mexican feminist platforms to fight against feminicides and machismo. It was through a collective lesson held in the Delegation itself and which was directed by the creator of Coruñesa, National Comic Award 2024. Twenty people participated in it, among which was the deputy delegate of the Government in A Coruña, María Rivas.

In the presentation, the government delegate, Pedro Blanco, recalled the four women murdered this year by male violence in Galicia and highlighted the importance of opening spaces for reflection on the violence suffered by women in all areas, including artistic or creative. In this case, using “thread and fabric as tools of collective expression of feminism and equality”, breaking with the “idea of embroidery as a domestic task, which many still have, that associates this activity to the traditional image of women in the house and in silence. Quite the opposite.” Pedro Blanco thanked the collaboration of Bea Lema, with whom he met on the occasion of the award of the National Comic Prize, to bring to Galicia, for the first time, this type of collective actions that are already present in other places of the world.

In particular, the actions of restorative embroidery were born more than ten years ago in Mexico with collectives such as ‘Boramos feminicidios’ and ‘Fuentes Rojas’, under the premise, ‘a victim, a cloth’. In these encounters, the act of sewing and embroidering is transformed into a collective dialogue, in which the people who participate reflect loudly on the violence, on the women attacked and transfer the fruit of this reflection to the fabric and thread. In addition, these meetings become safe spaces for women to reflect and express their personal experiences with machismo and, also, to denounce situations of personal violence. At times, 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 ‘Bordar feminicides’ initiative emerged in Mexico as a reaction to the reality that nine women and girls were killed on average a day in this country, according to UN Women data. Little by little, this idea caught on 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 Trade Union’, promoted the manufacture this year of 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.