A tailoring workshop defined by the words it conveys: writings of love and work, gathered among the chatter in a group of women from all over the world. A project by Landscape Choreography
The intention is to give voice, in various forms, to the women who live in the Quadrilatero di San Siro (a district of Milan, Italy): they run through ruined streets to accompany sons and daughters to school, they shop at the markets and manage the domestic economy through difficult linguistic translations. The idea is to free up time from the weighty care work that this community faces daily, to create spaces for meeting, speech, and self-training, potentially able to imagine small solutions to significant obstacles such as those of language, the search for a job, the discomfort of living and difficult gender relations.
“This area lacks spaces for women designed by women!” is the first sentence that marks our meeting: everything is ready to be told “Senza peli sulla lingua” (literally “without hairs on the tongue” an Italian idiom used to describe those persons that talk without filters), an image that then becomes the symbol of this path.
The workshop combines two aspects that seem important: the former is to articulate a speech on the relationship between work, care-work and non-work, the latter, is to try inventing a job done by a group of women, inside one space designed by women.
Thus was born the idea of โโa talking tailor activity that, starting from the sentences emerged during the chatter, creates lines of clothing defined by the words it conveys.The group begins to desire a space where it is possible to think and realise their productions, to imagine possible governance and an internal organisation, to understand what the city and extra-citizen self-production network could be in terms of collaboration.
From here on, we welcome anyone who wants to enter the project to provide materials, training, dissemination or anything else!
Landscape Choreography activates collective processes in the urban area. Through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates public art, urban planning, performing arts and social sciences, it promotes the culture of self-determination and the self-construction of common spaces, focusing on the direct participation of bodies in the construction of transformational physical and relational landscapes. "The question of the body, and in particular the body under capitalism, is a recurrent and indeed central topic. The collective body warms up, having rehearsals in the everyday life, to take care of his own time and rhythm, through the art of maintenance and the self-construction of the space for an assembly. The urban space is political. This is the stage for our idea of choreography". with Niroshini, Uthpala, Howaida, Nadia, Noura, Bahijam, Ebtesam, Siloja, Evelyn, Ghalia, Seynabou, Soumaia, Sumya, Doaa, Habe, Nagwa, Agham, Hanaa, Engie, Madda, Victoria, Haijba, Ahlam e Ana and many other to come! Photos by Gaia Giani