Persist, resist, stitch

What does knitting have to do with espionage? Can embroidery help your mental health? This talk shows how the skills to create textile art have enabled people to resist and to persist under oppressive regimes for centuries. And it offers ways to keep doing so. Working with textile mediums like yarn, thread, and floss is generally seen as a feminine hobby and as thus is usually classified as craft, not art. And crafting is something people, maybe even people usually seen as a bit boring, do in their free time to unwind. Most of us have grown up with the image of the loving grandmother knitting socks for the family, an act of care that was never considered anything special. The patriarchal society’s tendency to underestimate anything considered feminine and, inextricably connected to this, domestic is an ongoing struggle. But being underestimated also provides a cover and with it the opportunity for subversion and resistance. As global powers are cycling back to despotism and opression,