Stitching with intention

a process-based workshop that position hand embroidery not merely as a relational and political act. By engaging with the "Slow Art" movement, participants will explore how the meditative nature of stitching can foster individual wellness and community connection. The practice focuses on the labor of craftsmanship as a way to reclaim time, honor personal narratives, and build collective resilience.

This experience is facilitated by multidisciplinary artist and Senior Hand Embroiderer Duwenavue Santé Johnson. "For Johnson, a master of the needle trade, the artistic process is inseparable from the act of survival. "The process of mending a textile is identical to the process of mending a life," says Johnson. Her work collapses the distance between vocational expertise and communal storytelling, turning the technical precision of the stitch into a vehicle for social cohesion within a space of her own creation.”

https://www.duwenavuesantejohnson.com/bio#

https://www.instagram.com/sante_artxstitch.art/

The Parallel Play Symposium, presented as part of the six-week Collective Futures festival, is a two-day gathering of artists, scholars, organizers, and cultural workers exploring the practices, histories, and conditions that sustain collective cultural production. Through free panels, workshops, and performative presentations, participants will examine the cultural significance of collective art-making and artist-run spaces while sharing strategies for building and maintaining collaborative cultural infrastructures.

Organized around thematic tracks—including How To: Collective Tools & Tactics, Relational Infrastructures, Precarious Solidarities, “Have You Seen the ___?”: Memory and Collective Spaces, and Playground: Place, Ecology & Entanglement—the symposium will feature workshops, panels, performances, and conversations presented by ATUOMAT Collective, Luster Gallery + Studio, Obvious Agency, Vox Populi, Termite TV Collective, All Mutable, FORTUNE, FJORD, Big Ramp, Da Vinci Art Alliance, cinéSPEAK, Practice Gallery, and many other collaborators.

Registration is required for each session.