This seems like an amazing project. I’m sitting in a room that has a Hmong embroidery/applique of massacre. And a war rug from Afghanistan, or maybe a camp in Pakistan. I’ve been obsessed with the textiles of survival for a long time.
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Remarkably, the ancient and widespread practice of making story cloths offers a road to recovery that is consistent with insights from current brain science. In coping with adversity, women in many diverse cultures have gathered to support one another, and to sew that which they cannot speak into narrative textiles.
Those who have practiced this powerful form include the Chilean women who used potato sacks and scraps of clothing of the “disappeared” to sew story cloths during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Outlawed by the Laotian government, the textiles of the Hmong people provided a way to narrate their painful history. Amazwi Abesifazane (Voices of Women) is an archive of more than 3,000 story cloths made by South African women, showing their experiences under apartheid. The AIDS Memorial Quilt has been a massive effort by those who lost loved ones to pay tribute and to grieve — in textile form.
“We Are the Ones Who Are Bathed in Blood,” by a Pakistani refugee in Nepal, describes a terrorist attack at a mosque in 2010.