Join SoRA for Embodied Threads, a political embroidery workshop led by artist and educator Cinthya Santos-Briones where we work with materials drawn from media outlets and press archives to create textile maps connecting words, events, territories, and migrant experiences.
Embroidery circles have traditionally functioned as spaces for storytelling and healing, especially amongst communities of women as well as Latin American textile practices such as Chilean arpilleras and Bordados por la Paz in Mexico. In contrast to the speed of the news cycle in our age where information constantly appears, circulates, and disappears from our screens, embroidery proposes a different temporality: it invites us to pause, observe, and reread. By bringing these fragments of information onto a textile surface, what is often ephemeral and abstract acquires permanence and becomes a material trace of the discourses, policies, and forms of violence that shape our time.
Materials will be provided. No prior knowledge of embroidery is necessary to participate.
Cinthya Santos-Briones is an interdisciplinary artist, visual researcher, and educator of Nahua Indigenous heritage based in New York. Her practice explores migration, memory, spirituality, and resistance from a decolonial feminist perspective, using photography, archival research, text, and community-based textile practices. With a background in ethnohistory and anthropology, she worked for a decade at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), researching Indigenous migration, codices, textiles, and traditional medicine. Her projects have received support from Magnum Foundation, En Foco, National Geographic Research and Exploration, We Women, the Mellon Foundation, Wave Hill, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, BRIC, and El Museo del Barrio.
Image: Courtesy of the artist and photography by Parker Thomas-Hamlin