'Once upon a Time’ : a textile project in São Paulo, Brazil : Rose Little
I became involved in a textile project in Brazil through Sara Sa Pessoa, a college friend from Goldsmiths, who spent a year doing volunteer work at ACER (Children at Risk Foundation) in Eldorado, a marginalized community near São Paulo. Towards the end of her stay she initiated the project Era Uma Vez (Once Upon a Time), collecting stories and pictures from both children and adults in the community with a view to translating them into a textile work for ACER.
Sara and I held two fundraising textile workshops for the project at Lee Green Community Centre (see www.flickr.com/photos/rosebay01/17181194799 and www.flickr.com/photos/rosebay01/9411921316). Sara received generous funding from the Coats Foundation, including textile supplies, from the Coats Corrente factory in São Paulo. She returned to Eldorado in 2016 to make the textile work, having in the meantime collected more stories and pictures from a school in her hometown of Lisbon. In November 2016, I went to Eldorado and helped her in the final stages of the project.
I became involved in a textile project in Brazil through Sara Sa Pessoa, a college friend from Goldsmiths, who spent a year doing volunteer work at ACER (Children at Risk Foundation) in Eldorado, a marginalized community near São Paulo. Towards the end of her stay she initiated the project Era Uma Vez (Once Upon a Time), collecting stories and pictures from both children and adults in the community with a view to translating them into a textile work for ACER.
Sara and I held two fundraising textile workshops for the project at Lee Green Community Centre (see www.flickr.com/photos/rosebay01/17181194799 and www.flickr.com/photos/rosebay01/9411921316). Sara received generous funding from the Coats Foundation, including textile supplies, from the Coats Corrente factory in São Paulo. She returned to Eldorado in 2016 to make the textile work, having in the meantime collected more stories and pictures from a school in her hometown of Lisbon. In November 2016, I went to Eldorado and helped her in the final stages of the project.
The textile piece was to hang from the roof space of the games room at the top of the building and was intended to provide insulation in addition to having a decorative function. After considering various possible designs, Sara decided on eight triangular panels approximately 2 metres in length, which would hang in a circle in the centre of the room from the metal beams which held up the roof. The rest of the roof space would be covered with triangular panels of plain calico, with rectangular panels on two sides, which I helped her to dye blue in the canteen kitchen.
Each of the eight panels was based on drawings made by a different group. One had drawings by the children from the school in Lisbon, five by groups engaged in different activities at ACER such as guitar, capoeira, games, sport and art. Finally, two panels were based on drawings by groups of women, one of mothers who brought their children to ACER for English lessons and the other of women who belonged to the extended families of children whose parents were dead or unable to look after them and had adopted the children with the support of the ‘Guardian Families’ scheme run by ACER.
The main method used to interpret the drawings was needle felting, an uncomplicated technique that can be used to copy an image directly, and which appealed to the girls and boys alike. Appliqué was another important method, and there were also small amounts of embroidery, crochet, knitting, yo-yos and macramé. The motifs were worked separately before being appliquéd onto the background of unbleached or, in the case of two panels, tie-dyed calico. Sara’s blog at www.facebook.com/projetointerculturaleraumavez documents the project.
At the beginning of December the finished panels were given a backing and hung in the games room. The decorated panels were hung slightly lower than the surrounding plain ones. The mats in the games room were laid out for the opening so that the work could be viewed from below. A book containing the original stories and pictures also formed part of the inaugural exhibition.
It was a wonderful experience for me to see Sara’s project come together in the friendly and vibrant atmosphere of the ACER activity centre. I loved the way the work replicated in textile form the lively drawings made by children, young people and mothers from the local community.
Working with groups of women in the room at ACER set aside for the project, I was struck by how similar this experience was to the workshops I have attended and given in the UK, in Ireland and in Germany. Women come together to make, socialise, chat about their own lives and what’s going on in the world. They learn from each other and create useful and beautiful things out of that most evocative of materials, textiles.
Gradually there grew in the back of my mind the idea of starting a project of my own at ACER. My idea was to hold textile workshops for the women and young people of the Eldorado community, both as creative and therapeutic expression and on a more practical level as a means of making items for personal or household use or for sale. In an area scarred by poverty, cocaine addiction and violence, the skills they developed would encourage independence and hopefully enable them to generate a small income.
The women who helped with Era Uma Vez were very enthusiastic about the project and keen to continue sewing. Sara and I made a plan to go back to Eldorado in August for a few weeks to hold more workshops, but ideally we would like to establish textiles at ACER on a long-term, more sustainable basis. I made a proposal to employ a local freelance textile teacher to teach textiles at ACER for a few hours a week starting in March, after the summer holidays and carnival celebrations are over; Sara, as a Portuguese speaker, was happy to do the liaising. I initiated another fundraising programme of textile workshops, which are currently taking place once a month in both Ireland and London, and that is where we are at the moment.
I would like to thank members of London Quilters who have already supported this project by hosting and attending workshops and donating fabric. Clicking on the photographs below will give you some more information about the project.
Links for ACER:
www.acerbrasil.org.br
www.flickr.com/photos/acerbrasil
www.carf-uk.org
Each of the eight panels was based on drawings made by a different group. One had drawings by the children from the school in Lisbon, five by groups engaged in different activities at ACER such as guitar, capoeira, games, sport and art. Finally, two panels were based on drawings by groups of women, one of mothers who brought their children to ACER for English lessons and the other of women who belonged to the extended families of children whose parents were dead or unable to look after them and had adopted the children with the support of the ‘Guardian Families’ scheme run by ACER.
The main method used to interpret the drawings was needle felting, an uncomplicated technique that can be used to copy an image directly, and which appealed to the girls and boys alike. Appliqué was another important method, and there were also small amounts of embroidery, crochet, knitting, yo-yos and macramé. The motifs were worked separately before being appliquéd onto the background of unbleached or, in the case of two panels, tie-dyed calico. Sara’s blog at www.facebook.com/projetointerculturaleraumavez documents the project.
At the beginning of December the finished panels were given a backing and hung in the games room. The decorated panels were hung slightly lower than the surrounding plain ones. The mats in the games room were laid out for the opening so that the work could be viewed from below. A book containing the original stories and pictures also formed part of the inaugural exhibition.
It was a wonderful experience for me to see Sara’s project come together in the friendly and vibrant atmosphere of the ACER activity centre. I loved the way the work replicated in textile form the lively drawings made by children, young people and mothers from the local community.
Working with groups of women in the room at ACER set aside for the project, I was struck by how similar this experience was to the workshops I have attended and given in the UK, in Ireland and in Germany. Women come together to make, socialise, chat about their own lives and what’s going on in the world. They learn from each other and create useful and beautiful things out of that most evocative of materials, textiles.
Gradually there grew in the back of my mind the idea of starting a project of my own at ACER. My idea was to hold textile workshops for the women and young people of the Eldorado community, both as creative and therapeutic expression and on a more practical level as a means of making items for personal or household use or for sale. In an area scarred by poverty, cocaine addiction and violence, the skills they developed would encourage independence and hopefully enable them to generate a small income.
The women who helped with Era Uma Vez were very enthusiastic about the project and keen to continue sewing. Sara and I made a plan to go back to Eldorado in August for a few weeks to hold more workshops, but ideally we would like to establish textiles at ACER on a long-term, more sustainable basis. I made a proposal to employ a local freelance textile teacher to teach textiles at ACER for a few hours a week starting in March, after the summer holidays and carnival celebrations are over; Sara, as a Portuguese speaker, was happy to do the liaising. I initiated another fundraising programme of textile workshops, which are currently taking place once a month in both Ireland and London, and that is where we are at the moment.
I would like to thank members of London Quilters who have already supported this project by hosting and attending workshops and donating fabric. Clicking on the photographs below will give you some more information about the project.
Links for ACER:
www.acerbrasil.org.br
www.flickr.com/photos/acerbrasil
www.carf-uk.org
