Stitching Solidarity
Stitching Solidarity is an invitation to join an international creative community; creating space for each other and ourselves. Exploring solidarity as a form of consistently showing up and sitting with strangers; counteracting the social, physical, and geographic isolations of living in the coronavirus era.
An invitation for you to take 40-minutes each day for five days as time to replenish, and to focus on an activity that brings you solace. This might be cross-stitch, embroidery, knitting, drawing, meditation, yoga, reading, creative writing… Or another activity that enables you to draw breath, reflect, and take time to consider your response to the issue/s at hand, rather than immediately reacting to them.
Stitching Solidarity responds to the provocation ‘Let’s Reimagine Political Solidarity’, and the instruction to: propose how political and/or social solidarity can be collaboratively performed. Stitching Solidarity participants will be invited to email Antoinette with images, pdf texts, and/or weblinks to audio or video files of their responses to the provocation and contribute to the online Reimagining Citizenship Living Archive.
Structure
Each 40-minute Stitching Solidarity Zoom session will have a non-verbal welcome and the first 30-minutes will be silent. In the last 10-minutes you can – as an option – introduce yourself and share the activity you have been working on either verbally or via the Zoom chat function. To reduce Zoom-fatigue you are welcome to direct your webcam towards the project you are working on, then to participate, share the microphone and be seen for the last 10-minutes.
Upcoming dates and access to the Zoom details
Stitching Solidarity will usually take place at 4pm GMT on Thursdays and Tuesday mornings.
For more information contact Antoinette Burchill a.e.burchill@lboro.ac.uk
Context of the project: Re-Imagining Citizenship and the Living Archive
Re-imagining Citizenship is an ongoing, collaborative project initiated by the Politicized Practice/Anarchism/Theatre Activism research groups based at Loughborough University, UK (https://pparg.net/). We are looking for collective redefinitions of citizenship that are not prescribed or closed down by the language of the media, but rather opened up by artistic methods.
The Re-imagining Citizenship Activity Book/Re-imagining Citizenship Living Archive forms part of this ongoing dialogue around themes related to art and political activism. Since 2014, artists, researchers and associates of the three research groups have organised exhibitions, installations, performances and participatory events to explore the potential for art practices to re-imagine citizenship. These culminated in a series of activities during in March 2019, including the production of the Re-imagining Citizenship Activity Book which has thirty different contributions, inviting readers to respond creatively to sets of instructions (using text, images, video or audio) and to share them in the Living Archive on https://www.re-imagining.org.
If you would like to get involved with the Re-Imagining Citizenship and the Living Archive project, you can! Email re-imagining@lboro.ac.uk
About
Dr Antoinette Burchill is an independent researcher, visual artist and street theatre performer. Her practice-based research explores political dissent and participation, usually with a little mischief-making. She has been a member of the Politicised Practice Research Group since 2011, and a contributor to many events, performances, exhibitions in the UK and Europe. https://www.misachievement.co.uk