Repair Café & Darning the Planet practice will help you learn specific skills for visibly mending your own clothes and textiles in community. It will also encourage you to reflect about what making an item of clothing means.
Some ideas to practise Repair Café & Darning the Planet
Zurciendo el planeta (Darning the Planet) creates spaces to learn and practice various mending and recreation techniques, responding to the specific needs of the garments that participants want to mend.
These encounters offer the opportunity for people of diverse geographies and ages to use the act of dressing to imagine a different way of inhabiting the planet.
In these gatherings, we share experiences on important topics related to clothing: dressing as an act of ancestral subsistence vs. modern consumerism, programmed obsolescence, pollution through the textile industry, repair as an act of resistance, exploitation of resources, among others.
Each meeting/workshop begins with a brief presentation on the importance of reducing our consumption, the impact of textile waste, planetary limits and Transition movement.
Then we move on to the 'example of the day' which can be the repair of socks, jeans, crotches, blouses, knitted garments, also patches and interventions of clothes with artivist proposals.
From this demonstration the participants will start their own repairs and will be accompanied by questions to open the dialogue between the participants.
Zurciendo el planeta is an inspiring initiative in the service of collective transition, which is part of the international movement known as Repair Cafe, where people come together to share their skills to recover and repair all kinds of objects. This time we will focus on textile practice.
We have more than 15 years of experience using embroidery and textile art not only to repair, decorate or present a project but as a social tool to approach all types of communities to open dialogue, questioning, sharing of knowledge that allow us to know the needs of the community to generate regenerative projects, the creation of networks and alliances to imagine and build another possible world regenerating the social fabric.
Diving deeper
Master the art of Repair Café & Darning the Planet
You can use the below resources to become more skilled at this. Explore them at your own leisure:
Repair Café & Darning the Planet webinar recording (ES & EN)
Stay engaged
Opportunities to keep connected and learn more
The Transition Movement Virtual Platform can provide opportunities to keep in touch and keep exploring this topic together.
Also, Zurciendo el Planeta currently runs workshops mainly in person (Mexico City, Buenos Aires) but would be happy to develop more online events. Some ideas:
- Collective embroidering installation on how do we imagine a Transition town/solar punk in collaboration with Zurciendo el planeta initiative.
- Stitching can also be a healing practice: workshop on grief work for the planet through mending.
Websites and Social media of interest:
Transición México website
Zurciendo el planeta website
Zurciendo el planeta Instagram
Zurciendo el planeta Facebook
Member discussion