TEXTILE LIFE MAPS
:: PhD thesis
2023
_objects/research
Three textile life-maps created by three Latin American women at Torrasa’s sewing workshop, developed as part of my PhD research.
Conventional maps often reduce the city to lines and boundaries, overlooking the everyday practices and emotions through which people inhabit urban space. This presentation proposes an alternative approach by mapping through textiles, where fabric, color, thread, and gesture trace invisible urban stories. Focusing on women attending a sewing course in the metropolitan periphery of Barcelona, the study examines how survival on the city’s margins unfolds within the domestic sphere.
In a city shaped by neoliberal urbanization and the pressures of global capital, these women’s lives are increasingly defined by precarity, migration, and displacement. The domestic sphere emerges as a site of tension, where living on the margins intersects with control, dispossession, and territorial degradation. The home functions paradoxically as both refuge and prison, concentrating domestic labor, surveillance, violence, dependence, and the emotional burden of maintaining family well-being. Such physical, affective, and cognitive labor constitutes a geography of the invisible—a terrain difficult to trace, yet fundamental to comprehending the lived realities of urban marginality. But how can the invisible be mapped?
The research employs feminist and critical geographic methodologies emphasizing situated, non-extractive, and collaborative engagement. Over several months of fieldwork in the Torrassa neighborhood, participants created life textile maps from available scraps and materials, translating spatial experiences into tactile and visual forms. These maps reveal daily rhythms, affective ties, memories of past geographies, and negotiated spatial relations, showing that urban life is perceived not only through movement but also through emotional bonds, memory, and embodied routines. The act of cutting, stitching, and assembling fabric produces an alternative epistemology of space, foregrounding gendered and emotional dimensions of urban inhabitation, showing how domestic and public spheres are intertwined in women’s spatial imaginaries.
For participants, sewing workshops function as more than craft spaces: they become arenas of sociability, mutual support, and resistance, where migration, labor, and care work are shared and reimagined, and conventional domesticity is disrupted. In short, through textile maps, the invisible becomes visible: overlapping temporalities, affective infrastructures, and everyday practices sustaining urban life at the margins.