Fashion and migrants: exchanging embroidery skills






Britain does not have a good track record when it comes to refugees and migrants - Younis calls it a 'toxic attitude' and brands it as hypocritical, in view of Britain's colonial history. Horrendously xenophobic comments about refugees abound on social media. Only this morning I found in my Twitter feed the following;

"Mountains of recycling and waste pile up on roadsides across Britain - as homeowners dump trash at local tips due to cancelled bin collections Get the pretend refugees to help clear it, once word gets about they've got to work, they will stop coming".

I felt disgusted by such callousness, but it is not so uncommon to hear/read such comments.

EU countries are not doing so well either in terms of their policies about refugees, even though they take in way more than the UK does. Take post-Salvini Italy (far-right former Interior minister Matteo Salvini closed ports and refugee camps and is known for saying, with utter contempt, that the whole of Italy had become a refugee camp). Italy has a huge problem in terms of its attitude to refugees and migrants (I know that the two terms are different, but in common parlance, they tend to be conflated).

Hadim Nyassi, 21, from the Gambia sums it as follows: "Italy is not open. They don't want us here. I went to the Netherlands, and then Germany. But then I was sent back here. We can't work. We can't live anywhere. But we also can't leave."

People don't want to be refugees, no more than they want to be victims of fire or any other calamity. It seems counterintuitive to blame them for wanting to live.

So I felt quite elated when I read about the project by FOO Italy (Fondation Orient- Occident) Migrants du Monde in the city of Lecce, in the beautiful Salento region, a place to which I have a connection. FOO, founded in Morocco by Yasmina Filali, has partnered with ARCI to set up an atelier, where migrant women with embroidery and sewing skills exchange knowledge with local women, with expertise in local traditions of embroidery and sewing.







It is a wonderful project that opens up many possibilities and focusses on cooperation. For one whole year, the project will be housed in the splendid Palazzo Turrisi, one of the best examples of the baroque architecture for which Lecce is so well known.

There are precedents to the project. In September 2019 Migrant du Monde presented a contemporary collection, also the result of a collaborative effort with migrant women involving local Italian designer Bruna Pizzichini and French designer Isabelle Camard, at the local Museo Castromediano.

Fashion and refugees: we know only too well of Syrian child refugees being exploited in Turkish sweatshops, as the BBC uncovered in 2016.

But there are, fortunately, other initiatives too, even in the UK, which are aimed at promoting skills and fostering equality, as Melissa Chaplin writes in her op-ed for Fashion Roundtable.

The Lecce project is however quite unique in that it focuses on skills exchange, drawing on different yet complementary embroidery traditions. I am familiar with the crafts of the Salento region and I know of the beautiful lace made by the Salentine women, an art that is passed on from generation to generation.







Traditional Salento embroidery (from mangiabeneblog)





Moroccan embroidery is equally beautiful. The migrant women are not just from Morocco but also from other African and Middle Eastern countries where there are strong embroidery traditions. The results of this experiment promise to be quite spectacular.

I don't think there could be a better way to start the decade, through collaborative work, and making beautiful, wearable, artistic creations.




(All photos, unless otherwise stated, are from FOO Italy)

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