Sewing as a method for investigating the city

Abstract

This paper aims to present reflections that emerged from the urban intervention “Sewing Dreams”, which was initially conceived as a performance of the female sewing, an essentially domestic chore, in a public space. From this practical action, we have built our own “war machine” in which we found the opportunity to search for our methodological process grounded on sewing as a category of analysis, on ephemerality, subjectivity, on the power of evoking female bodies and their history. Assuming feminist epistemologies allowed us to envision fundamental aspects of the reflection regarding the question of method in sciences and, by using uncertainties and instabilities as categories of analysis, we confronted the limits of the traditional scientific method. It was possible, from this other perspective, to develop thoughts about women and the city, about how their territory-bodies are subject to the logic of patriarchal capitalism. Through the subversion of the sewing device, we have established our relationship with knowledge.