Vol. 10 No. 23 (2024): Dossier Initial and Continuing Teacher Education: opportunities and challenges in everyday professional life
COVER
“Esperanzar”, Embroidery on fabric and tulle, 32 x 40 cm – 2023
Embroidering is composing gestures that express, through thread and fabric, ways of being in and with the world. With these gestures, I create time within the time of my daily teaching activities to compose other forms of attentiveness to objects and desires for expression. I discovered embroidery while writing and researching my doctoral thesis in education between 2014 and 2018. In that research, school cartography was treated as a problem, and my encounter with art (and embroidery) opened up possibilities for reimagining and sensitizing official maps. In a series of embroideries, through the profanation of cartographies, the needle and thread pierced through the static, the given, and the unquestionable ways of producing spatial representations. By weaving threads through fabrics, it became possible to see the world through its reverse side, just as it became possible to create cartographies that deterritorialize the official order of maps by traversing territories fixed by representation, reterritorializing life that insists on traversing static cartographies.
In addition to these issues, the investigation of artists like Leonilson, Bispo do Rosário, and Rosana Paulino, who use embroidery as a medium in their works, was essential to deepening my techniques and also to educating my aesthetic gaze. This is perhaps the most beautiful part of teaching: when research paths lead us to other places, stitching other aesthetic and theoretical connections. In this embroidery "Esperanzar" (2023), the theoretical and aesthetic encounter occurred with two interlocutors: Paulo Freire and Joaquim Torres Garcia. From Paulo Freire, I drew upon words from the dictionary organized by Danilo Streck, Euclides Redin, and Jaime José Zitkoski, published in 2008, which I use in my Didactics classes at UFPR. The book La Ciudad Sin Nombre, published in 1941 by Torres Garcia, was the aesthetic inspiration for the embroidery, as well as his other work América Invertida, from 1943. In the book, as well as in the map, I found a resonance with the gesturality of hands that embroidery also demands. Torres Garcia insisted on keeping the handwriting instead of typesetting in his book because he believed typography was too impersonal, thus presenting a perfect symbiosis between drawings and writing.
The creation of this embroidery, with words and Torres Garcia's inverted map, emerged from an encounter with another geographer and professor from the University of Buenos Aires, Claudia Pedone. Together, we reflected on the writing about my cartographic embroideries for the "Geografía y Arte" section of Revista Punto Sur (2023). The idea was to present, through writing, the connections between some embroideries and her research on migrant women in South America. At the time, Claudia was concerned about the direction the elections might take for the Argentine people. Between phone conversations and exchanging audio messages, we came to Paulo Freire and the verb-word he created: "Esperançar." For Freire, "esperançar is to rise up, esperanzar is to pursue, esperanzar is to build, esperanzar is to not give up." As the inevitable unfolded, presenting this word and embroidering it on the fabric alongside other significant words was a way to manifest our care in threads. We mainly discussed the meaning of "esperançar," which, without a specific translation, brought us closer to constructing meaning between two languages: Esperanzar.
These subtle handcrafts compose the expressive qualities or the materials of expression in the embroidered image. These materials of expression perhaps precede the composition of the work itself. A gesturality is incited in this hand-writing-making process that involves choosing the arrangement of the design, the textures of the fabrics, the colors and thicknesses of the threads, the place in the home to settle in and begin embroidering... Gestures that pass through the hands, through the subtlety of holding the threads and firmly guiding them through the fabric, creating volumes and textures as the threads cross the fabric. In this hand-writing-making process, another time is organized, one that doesn't fit into the Lattes curriculum, the work schedules of the university, or classroom hours. Rather, they are wandering threads in contrast to homogenizing teaching. To pierce through the given in order to encounter other forces. To traverse the fabric's weaves, proposing volumes, textures, colors, and desires for expression in the flat spaces of official cartography. Continuing with the proposal of exercises in attentiveness to the possible research universes that embroidery opens up in education and geographic education, in preparing for teaching, and in constructing for oneself inventive procedures in which learning is the very process that provokes displacements.
Karina Rousseng Dal Pont
Professor at the Department of Theory and Teaching Practice at the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR)
@kadalpont
