This guide is for all collectives or groups that stitch together and who want to delve deeper into imagining the world we yearn for and who wish to capture their visions of the future in a textile creation.
One might say that human societies have two boundaries. One boundary is drawn by the requirements of the natural world and the other by the collective imagination.
Susan Griffin. To Love the Marigold: Hope & Imagination
Imagining is “childsplay”, but sometimes we find it harder than we realise to imagine: especially when it comes to imagining the future positively. We are much more exposed in mainstream media and popular culture to imagining the worst. Think how many apocalyptic movies and novels you’ve seen and read, and now how many whose narrative is the construction of a future that would be better than the present.
What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.Bell Hooks.
All About Love: New Visions
That’s why we designed this guide to help you and your collective/group of friends think about that positive alternative future that you yearn for in your locality. We will be adding more materials that can help unleash your imagination.
Further resources on imagination
The first part of this guide talks about materials and measurements. The second part addresses the theme, which each group will define to express their realities, both material and immaterial.
Part 1: Material Issues
For sewing:
- reused fabric, old clothes, torn sheets, everything that people usually throw away or donate, scraps that have been stored for decades;
- threads (if you already have some, saved from mothers and grandmothers, that’s amazing, but when they run out, we recommend buying, ideally national brands and natural fibers/colours, where possible);
- needles matching your threads and fabrics;
- pins;
- scissors;
- paper (reused, if possible) and pencils to plan and think out designs.
In the Zurciendo el planeta collective, we strongly insist on the issue of reusing, rescuing, or recovering textiles. The textile industry today is broken. We have moved from a time when every human on earth knew how to contribute to the creation of textiles, and valued the enormous time and effort involved in their making, to a time when almost noone knows how to create clothes and the minority that do, are overwhelmingly exploited in that production, as well as contributing some of the highest greenhouse gas emissions of any industry (bar only the petrochemical industry). We all wear clothes every day so it’s an issue that affects us all.
Mending our clothes and transforming them into new pieces or activist art are acts of rebellion and resistance against a way of life that is destroying the planet. You can read more about the importance of reusing textiles below.
Why it’s important to reuse textiles
Important data on the measurements of your finished creation
For your collective piece to be installed within the forest, it must have quite precise measurements.
Each individual piece of the Forest of Hope measures 30cm wide and 30 or 60 cm long. They are joined together by buttons and buttonholes, and their assembly depends on these being at the same distance from each other.
WIDTH: The collective pieces will be larger, but their width must be a multiple of 30cm (60 cm, 90 cm or 120 cm). In the representation below, an expression of «unleashed collective imagination» is seen in the middle of the Forest of Hope and measures 60 x 60 cm:
So, you can choose to make a piece 60 cm or 90 cm wide. There are some (few) 120 cm wide pieces, but working with very large pieces can become more complicated. If you have experienced sewers in your collective, feel free to go for it!
LENGTH: the length doesn’t matter as much, but ideally it would also be 60 or 90 cm.
Tips from the old hands: choose a large fabric (tablecloth, curtain, sheet) the full size you want to make your piece, with +2cm of margin all around for hemming later. You should mark the design space with a pencil or fabric chalk to make sure all your key design elements are inside the measured area. This can then serve as your canvas, and on it you can work on your layout with cut fabrics and embroideries as you define your collective design. Also bear in mind that buttons and buttonholes will be cut in the top and bottom 4 cm so avoid putting crucial elements in these spaces.
Very soon we will make a video on how to measure and place the buttons and buttonholes correctly in collective pieces.
If you have any questions, write to us and we will help you however we can (for example if you have doubts about the size of your collective piece). You can write to us in Spanish, English, French, Portuguese… and further languages we will have to ask deepl for help.
Contact
For Swedish queries please see the Call to Stitch in Swedish.
Upprop: vi skapar ett textilt ekosystem
Part 2: How to Organize a Collective Embroidery
The truth is that stitching collectively is an excellent metaphor for any other organizational challenge (including how to address climate change). It is one of the reasons why we believe this experience can strengthen groups.
Sewing and embroidery are ancestral technologies for which we have evolved: these activities calm the mind and work our body, connect our heart and mind through our hands, release oxytocin and connect us with the collective and the sense of a bigger meaning. In a world where we are surrounded and immersed in digital technologies, we want to invite you to reconnect with this ancestral social technology!
Some reflections:
- Not everyone is necessarily going to stitch – this used to frustrate me, but you have to go with the flow. In reality there are many different tasks that contribute to the collective creation and all deserve recognition: convening and inviting neighbors, organizing and facilitating meetings, proposing ideas, gathering fabrics and clothes, drawing, cutting, machine sewing, hand sewing, preparing drinks and food for others… We don’t all want to do all the activities, but we can all do some of them.
- The process is important. Although the final piece lasts over time, the process and the woven relationships and shared memories can be more important, pay attention to them. Take photos, invite someone to be a rapporteur and keep a “chronicle of creation”.
- Don’t rush. A collective creation will not be finished in one sitting. It is okay to change your mind too about the details. Give yourselves time to express opinions, share. That’s where the value of this activity lies. Then you’ll see how you can organize yourselves. We consider it important that there should be several collective meeting sessions, but there can also be moments where different people take the piece home to advance in their free time. In 2023, a collective in Argentina created their piece on 4 canvases of 30 x 60 cm so that 4 people could work in their homes at the same time. These 4 canvases are installed together to form a single figure.
- Sewing in Public Spaces. If it’s safe, we encourage you to gather in public spaces to sew and embroider your collective creation. Hopefully, people will come up to ask what you’re doing, and you can share about what you’re stitching and the collective action you’re portraying. This way, you can spread the word about collective imagination and the real possibilities in our future.
Setting the Mood for the Gathering
We recommend starting your meetings (but especially your first meeting) with a playful activity that invites people to focus on the place and the ideas to be discussed. It could be a grounding exercise or a reading or song that brings everyone to synchronize and focus their thoughts. We’ll leave you some suggestions in the link below.
Ideas for stitch gatherings
If you have other techniques that work well, we’d love for you to share your wisdom so that other groups can try them too.
How to Design Your Piece
You’ll have to start by presenting a bit of context for the proposal to be stitched. (If you need materials about the Zurciendo el planeta collective, just ask us for them).
Once everyone agrees to make a collective piece and contribute it to the global project, the most interesting part begins: what will you represent?
How to Unleash Imagination?
Basically, we want to ask ourselves:
«What would happen if we did everything right?»
There are various techniques we’ve taken from writers like Joanna Macy and Chris Johnston in their book Active Hope or from Rob Hopkins’ work on imagination. They are similar but slightly different. Both invite us to imagine possible actions or experience the future we yearn for.
- Read the dynamic of talking to someone from the future from Active Hope to share experiences of how to trigger actions for a more just and regenerative future
- Read Rob Hopkins’ dynamic of a journey to the future we yearn for to generate a «collective memory of the future»
Now that you’ve shared ideas, you can take out paper and pencil, old clothes, and scissors, to continue sharing as you design your collective creation to capture the sensory experiences of the futures envisioned.
To try other stories of more regenerative futures, we have two experiences from the collective on the site: Letter from the Future We Want and What If Fossil Fuel Extraction Stopped?
You could also have a look at:
Further resources on imagination
Contact
If your group starts making a piece using this guide, please register in this form I’m joining the Ecosystem of Hope!. Send us some photos of you putting together your collective artwork.
We want to be able to support you, even if we are far away.
We will continue to improve the materials here on the website, so we greatly value any observation or suggestion you have.
Over the following months, we will be organizing talks on various topics, about the crisis, but also about hope and imagination, and we would like to invite you and for you to share your group’s experiences.
To access these activities, please let us know that you are working on your creations so we can add you to the invitation list for virtual activities of the collective.
I’m joining the Ecosystem of Hope!
And to finish…
When your collective piece is ready, we invite you to follow these steps to be able to identify it, to know the story of its creators well, and for it to reach our hands safely.