Threads of Solidarity: Human Rights and Justice is an exhibition at  London’s City Lit of hand-made textile art created by Bordando por la Memoria (Embroidering Memory), a transnational textile collective of Chileans. The exhibition highlights General Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, which forcibly disappeared 3,000 children, women, and men and executed many others between 1973 and 1990. 

To this day, many across Latin America and diaspora communities face uncertainty about what happened to their relatives and friends. Many also experience ‘desmemoria’ (wilful forgetting). For many political prisoners in Chile, making crafts was part of their detention. The exhibition is a curated collection of embroidered pieces that embody collective protest, commemoration, resistance, empowerment and solidarity. 

It also underlines that the struggle for human rights, democracy, and justice is ongoing. Indigenous Mapuche people are still disappearing, and democratic protesters face excessive police force.

Martin Jorgensen, Head of Programme: History, Politics, Philosophy and Science at City Lit, said: “We are immensely proud of this exhibition on human rights, justice, and solidarity as part of the collaboration between City Lit and Bordando por la Memoria within our wider human rights focus. The works that make up the exhibition are true celebrations of creativity, collaboration, collective resistance and the ability to tackle difficult issues such as loss, state-sponsored violence, the politics of time and memory and wider questions such as who has the right to say that it is time to move on and that the experiences and impacts of state-sponsored violence are in the past and not still present.”

Bordando por la Memoria is a collective made up of first and second generation Chileans from the Chilean exiled community that arrived in the UK after the 1973 military coup, along with their supporters based in the UK. Since 2018, the project has been working on textiles that memorialize the lives of the men, women, and children killed in the Chilean dictatorship. It is a patchwork of personal testimonies and gives historical context to the use of making textiles in Chile as a way of collective resistance.

As one of the participants said, “By using stitching and scraps of fabric we are not only honouring the Chilean ‘arpilleristas’ (embroidered patchwork makers) who told their stories in textiles testimonies during the dictatorship, we are also honouring our collective stories, and our healing as survivors, not as passive victims.”

Now more than ever, says the collective, there is a divide in Chile between those who want to eradicate the past and those who want to preserve it. As Milan Kundera said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

The group’s work has included textiles condemning more recent governments, including that of Sebastián Piñera, who was President from 2018 to 2022. Some of their work highlights the social uprising of October 2019, where over 40 people were killed and over 400 were left without an eye because of the plastic bullets fired at the protesters.

The exhibition runs until Tuesday 25^th February from 9am to 9pm at City Lit, 1-10 Keeley Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2B 4BA.

Images: c/o Labour Hub.