Paper short abstract:

This project reflects ethnographically upon the commonalities between knowledge making practices in the material and embodied encounter of handcraft embroiderers and engineers in Colombia. My aim is to highlight the role of careful destruction and mending in the sewing of this encounter.

Paper long abstract:

My research pivots around what engineering and textile handcraft practices can learn from each other; in particular in terms of knowledge making practices. For this I have been interested in setting up knowledge dialogues as spaces of encounter between groups of electronic, mechanical and computer systems engineers and communities of handcraft embroiderers, weavers and patchworkers in Colombia. Throughout these encounters, the collective is expected to work together and learn from each other with common materialities, such as conductive and non-conductive threads, textiles, pens, as well as objects which might seem unfamiliar or useless: beads, needles, LEDs, embroidery frames, boards, to name some. These encounters operate in similar ways to sewing circles (a costurero in Spanish): ways of gathering, of generating individual and collective creative process, of bonding emotionally with each other throughout materialities. My role as an ethnographer in these spaces of encounter has been to understand the happenings, and to identify the mutual learning. In this session I would trace, through a direct involvement with materialities, ways of textile crafting, and one particular experience of making and doing that I have identified is common both to engineering and to handcraft embroidery/weaving/patchworking, and that is the practice of careful destruction and mending. Thus, this project contributes to the embodied understanding of craftwork and women's labour as knowledge, and it does so highlighting the specificities of a particular craft and its potentialities as tropes to think with engineering practices.