Join us for a half-day hand embroidery workshop run by Chilean embroiderers that uses art for wider political and social purposes.

The workshop methodology — first developed during the dictatorship — explores collective artistic methodologies for reflecting on histories of trauma and resistance.

Beginners to embroidery are welcome to attend.  

The session will include a demonstration of some basic stitches. It will give participants an introduction to embroidery as record and resistance, and the opportunity to practice some simple and useful stitches suggested to use on the design.

Next, the session will draw on the experience of Chileans who came to the UK as refugees and how their rights and resistance to the dictatorship were depicted in the embroidery as a method for recording memory and resistance.

Finally, the group will reflect on the content/story of their embroidery, the text chosen and the use of embroidering as a tool to keep memories, resist, and denounce.

Participants will leave with the beginning of a beautiful embroidered item and diagrams of the stitches covered, to refer back to when they get home.

The British Library of Political and Economic Science (@LSELibrary) was founded in 1896, a year after the London School of Economics and Political Science. It has been based in the Lionel Robbins Building since 1978 and houses many world class collections, including the Women's Library and Hall-Carpenter Archives.