On the work table of Garbiñe Muñoz (San Sebastián, 38 years old), better known by her stage name Garby Galatea, there are needles, scissors, awls and threads of all colors. Also hundreds of photographs, bits of other people’s lives or their own that, consciously or purely fortuitously, have ended up in their hands. And, in his hands, a needle. He selects one of the photographs on the table: a snapshot of an unknown couple, a man and a woman, in black and white, dating from the 1960s, judging by their clothes and hairstyles. Immediately afterwards, she meticulously begins to sew the man’s face: “It seems important to me to relive the memories, but it is also important that bad memories can be covered, I think that the process has something of a healer.”
Garbi Galatea uses the photographic embroidery technique as the surgeon uses the threads to close a wound. In her project, erased embroidery, covers with threads of pastel tones, traditionally feminine, the faces of men who have invaded or assaulted a woman at some point. It is a personal project, but also a collective one: “The women tell me their testimony and I search my photo archive until I find a photo that is similar to that situation. For example, if a girl experienced an invasion by her father, I try to find a photo of a father and a daughter, the same age as she was at that time, and then I cover it up, delete it, delete it ”.
The artist came across photographic embroidery by chance, after having been interested in sewing years before and having learned the traditional embroidery technique: “However, the blank cloth made me nervous, because I didn’t know how to interpret it,” she admits to this journal. In her grandparents’ house there were hardly any family prints due to a lack of resources, which is almost the same as saying that there were no memories of her. Ten years ago, she began scavenging and collecting other people’s photographs, found at thrift sales or bought in batches online, to fill in for the absence of her own family album. Later, uniting her two interests, she began to intervene in her extensive photographic archive through embroidery.
“I always say that this technique is like doing Photoshop in a manual and artistic way,” he explains to EL PAÍS Lorraine Olmedo, a plastic artist specialized in embroidery on photography and textiles and who, like Garbi, gives workshops to get started in the world of photographic embroidery. A technique, an art and even an unconventional form of therapy that, like other activities related to crafts such as crochet or pottery, has experienced a surge of interest during and, especially, after confinement, either to channel artistic expression, to stimulate the imagination, to free ourselves from daily stress or to disconnect from the noisy world that surrounds us.
Olmedo acknowledges that during the pandemic he “did not stop”: “These spaces have become increasingly necessary; people seek to meet, chat, share, connect and bond. People spend a lot of time alone, work long hours, and the cities are huge, and they come here, embroider, and forget about their problems for two hours. In the end, it’s like doing therapy, because embroidery is a very therapeutic exercise”.
The two artists agree that their workshops in Madrid are attended mainly by women and few men. It is natural: embroidery has traditionally been a feminine territory. Already in the Odyssey, Penelope escaped choosing from her long list of suitors installed in her palace, arguing that, before opting for any of them, she had to finish weaving a shroud for King Laertes, father of her husband Odysseus. Every day, she Penelope sewed and every night, she undid all the work of the previous day. It was so logical that a woman dedicate herself to those tasks that she, for years, did not raise suspicion, until a maid gave her away. “To know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women,” Rozsika Parker, a feminist art historian, wrote in 1984 in an essay titled The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (The subversive stitch: embroidery and the construction of the feminine).
“In the past, embroidery was an activity imposed on women”, explains Garbi Galatea, “a way of keeping them busy, generally isolated, and focused on the same task for hours on end. Embroidering was a way of locking them up at home, of keeping them away from the outside world”. However, it also left room for escape and creativity and, as time went by, women began to come together to embroider collectively, creating, without knowing it, what today we would call safe spaces.
Later, at the beginning of the 20th century, the English suffragettes would embroider the slogan “Deeds, not words” on some of their favorite objects, such as parasols or handkerchiefs, once symbols of delicacy and femininity, to demand the right to vote. It made sense: in British schools girls were trained in weaving to educate them in domesticity, so when they got together to talk about their rights there was something they all knew how to do, so they made their own protest tools with their own hands. : posters, banners, bands and scarves with slogans such as “dare to be free” or “claim with courage” embroidered on top. In the 1960s and 1970s, the second wave of feminism took the pioneers as an example and also took up their needles to dignify, on the one hand, domestic and invisible work and, on the other, to denounce the oppression of the system.
Already in the new millennium, the writer, sociologist and expert knitter Betty Greer popularized the term craftivisma movement that unites crafts (craft, in English) with activism. In recent times, embroidery has experienced a subversive renaissance: it is no coincidence that in the 2017 Women’s March on Washington to protest the rise of President Donald Trump to power, women used pink hats knitted by them as a symbol. same.
The technique may be different, but the intention of making visible and even highlighting what we did not see in the past or to which we did not pay attention through the intervention of the thread and the needle is the essence of photographic embroidery. “Recently I received a beautiful commission: some friends wanted to have a detail with a dear friend, who had just overcome breast cancer,” says Lorena Olmedo, “it was a black and white photograph of the woman herself, where she was holding a chest. And, from there, I made some mimosas sprout. The piece was titled To flourish and showed how life, and strength, flowed from his own body. Olmedo is more attracted to women: “I seek to observe them under a new look, put them together, rediscover them.” The same thing happens to Garbi Galatea: “I like to think that, through this technique, we can take our grandmothers, mothers or aunts that appear in the photographs and give them a new life. Also embroider ourselves so as not to forget who we are”.
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