LORELEÏ: The needle, held by my hand, is conceptualized here to provide a mean to navigate across many times and places through those borders. The history of needle practices opens a breech in which stories can exist, communicate, correspond, although they went missing from schoolbooks and collective hegemonic memory.

DIANA: The needle, held by many hands, is not conceptualized here to fulfill a romantic fetishism between women and laces. It is to resist essentialism. It is a tool for women to express themselves, a tool that has been systematically forced on them, and extracted from them.
It is, in time of war, a weapon against the dominant forces; and in time of loss, an object to gather around and create a /ˈteks.tʃər/ to mourn the dead.

LORELEÏ: Stories are fragmented, amputated, romanticized in order to fit into the thin archive of textiles contained in ethnographic museums and the opulent and nationalist representations of craft knowledges proposed by fashion retrospectives.

DIANA: This research is an attempt to restore the complexities of the histories of needleworkers. It aims to trace a genealogy of postures and practices, to voice what has been silenced, weaving a new, wide network of intersections in our struggles.

SAIDYIA: The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So, it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none.

LORELEÏ: It’s not about filling the gaps, the process of re/membering is an attempt to approach the research material differently, to develop methodologies and spaces where the hierarchies of the sweatshops could, for a moment, be abolished. It is an attempt to create a space and time that would allow the living and the dead to be together for a moment, it is less about providing closure than openings. It is about the necessity of something else. Or, to put it differently and pay a part of the immense debt I owe you, Nelly, je veux une maison faite de sorties de secours.