Coordinator: Prof. Samia Ahmed Elsheikh


Send  Square Gifts in a letter to: 
Prof. Samia Ahmed Elsheikh
Faculty of Art Education. 
12 Ismail Mohamed Street.
Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt. 11561.

Exhibition at Faial Recycling Centre
Island of Faial, Azores, Portugal
 
Local Curator: Bela Dutra
​Organisation: APECV
Support: Government of Azores, Department of Climate Action.


 
Venue:  Faial Waste Processing Centre
 
The Faial Waste Processing Centre has been in operation since 2015. In 2018, its concession was granted to the company Resiaçores, which also manages the Waste Processing Centres on the islands of Corvo, Flores, Pico and Santa Maria.
 
Date:  April- May 2026 (opening on 12 April 2026).

 
Background
Textile Cartographies stakeholders and arts-based practitioners know we will not solve the problems of textile production and consumption, but we firmly believe more cultural and educational tools in formal and non-formal settings must be put in place with communities, schools and universities to raise awareness and change consumption behaviours and enhance resilience. Arts-based methods, such as collective textile making, craftivism and exhibitions are our choice to raise critical questions, invite public commentary, and offer alternative methods to contribute to cultural and critical educational strategies. 
 
Textile Cartographies is a social movement that began as a participatory action research project using textile arts as storytelling, coordinated by APECV Research Group on Arts, Community and Education (GriArCE) in 2022. Currently the network has 35 groups involving participants from 22 countries from universities, schools, collectives and associations in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe. Each group has one or more coordinators and develop actions with participants. The actions are designed with the participants to reflect on pressing social issues about the environment, climate justice, social justice and sustainability issues by exploring visual discourses using arts and textile technologies. Groups who already participated are located in Australia; South Africa: Namibia; Egypt; India, Iran; Israel; Kyrgyzstan; Indonesia; Italy: Norway; The Netherlands; Portugal; Spain; Latvia; China; Japan; Brazil; Mexico; Colombia; USA and Canada. By April 2025, nearly 6000 people will have engaged in TC actions organized by the local coordinators in museums, schools, universities, cultural sites, social/health care centres and non-profit organisations.
 
Since 2022, the Textile Cartographies Network, has been developing actions and educational projects for peace, environmental awareness and sustainability of the planet, through workshops, exhibitions and academic and community publications in many countries. The groups continue to be interested in exploring textile art and craft as storytelling in order to facilitate means for people to express their concerns visible using alternative ways of communication. Recently some groups have taken up textiles and digital technologies, as it can potentially reduce the environment and climate pressures from textiles by improving efficiency. However, we are aware digital technologies also risk increasing production and consumption of textiles, for example, through social media or online platforms which have significant environmental impacts.
 
The groups are strongly committed with digital and non-digital forms of communication to advocate for reducing and recycling materials. Educational actions using arts-based methods have been the main tool for advocacy in this network, through workshops, conferences and exhibitions in strategic community places. The network is more and more interested in exploring how to enhance circularity by extending product lifespans through longer use, increased reuse, repair and more efficient recycling, and reduce the demand for new raw materials. Slow fashion and circular economy are important concepts in the project pedagogies (see TC kit developed in 2022 by researchers from C3 group). In this call, APECV Group invites Textile Cartographies coordinators to send a collection of fabric textile squares 10x10 cm in reply to the urgent need to change human textile consumption habits.
 
 
Why the Azores?
The Azores archipelago, as a microcosm of the planet, represents unique social spaces, physical places and cultural contexts to explore arts, craft, design, and to reconsider how we live and why we consume patterns of ‘newness’ in contemporary society. From a lateral geographic position, we enlarge our ‘centric’ vision differently, and with response-ability to decentre western hegemonic practices, specifically relating to textiles. As such we propose the next collective world exhibition of TC in 2026,  in the island of Faial.
For this exhibition, we adopt craftivism as our methodological disposition as we take up crafting practices – stitching, needlework, knitting, crocheting and other forms of textile work – as a form of political protest and to advance social causes in relation to ‘glocal’ (global and local) issues and events. Craftivism has roots in feminist environmentalism and feminist new materiality, and encompasses individual and collective art practices that build upon identity, agency, social care and political movements.
In this call, we address two primary themes: climate change and acts of resilience:
 
Circulation Stories: Acts of Mending
Facing the emergency in adapting to climate change, new models are emerging, for example, circular economies and slow consumption. Implementation of bio-waste selective collection systems is crucial for circular economy, which promotes the closing of the material cycle and guarantees the quality of recyclables. The Azores Strategic Waste Management Plan has been a vital tool for defining structured waste management strategies, and addressing existing gaps and problems. Bela Dutra, our local curator, works for the Department of Waste Management in the Directorate of Environment and Climate Action for the local government. She is an environmental activist and advocates for a radical transformation of consumption habits towards circular economy; slow fashion and craft-making on the Island. She is also involved in raising public awareness of climate crisis in education. After our second exhibition of TC in 2022, Bela Dutra’s invitation to return next year to the Island presents the Textile cartographies participants a new challenge: A non-traditional venue for an art exhibition, and a call to bring our voices to this paradise in the middle of the Atlantic. From there we can may be reverberate our narratives through our squares.
 
 
Silent Stories: Acts of Resilience
Textile cartographies resides in the middle of art, education and social justice. In this moment, we attend to acts of resilience. From one side we have the climate emergency in the planet, and this motivation may limit our choice of materials for the upcoming exhibition. We will re-use, re-create, re-imagine longer life for old fibres, and in the process, re-invent art-making with less polluting fibres. From another side, we call out to another emergency: to denounce the gradual increasing of intolerance, lost of democracy, bipolarization and dehumanization of the current genocides and war crimes happening now in Gaza, Sudan, and more places of the world. Against the fear of public discourses, we make art in response, to reclaim space for the unspoken, the indescribable, what is not possible in words, but needs to be expressed visually. These accounts of our time may be present in our textile narratives.  Participants can tell their stories in their squares. All the stories will be welcome in the cartography.
 
 
Side-Events
During the opening of the exhibition, the following actions will take place;

• a Conference with the TC participants willing to come (target audience - teachers, educators, artists, etc)
• a workshop for children and young people (school, community site)

 
If you want to participate in the side events please confirm until 15  January 2026. 
 
The CALL
Participants can contribute indivually or in a group. 
 
We call for 10x 10 cm textile narratives. The works are gifts to RESIACORES, and will not be returned. Participants can send individual pieces or pieces made by a group of people. Please write in the reverse of the squares, your name, the name of group, author, title, location, date, etc, and add also a signed consent form for the exhibition.
 
Please download the consent form here and add to your package as well as information about the work in the reverse of each square (title, author, or group name if applicable, medium, message, country, date)
●      TEMPLATE for participants in Exhibitions/Workshops (English)

 
Sending the Squares/Gifts  until 20 March 2026 to: 
Address:
APECV.   Quinta da Cruz.
Estrada de São Salvador.
3510-784 São Salvador – Viseu
Portugal


IMPORTANT 
​Please note that  artworks will not be returned. The  textile squares are a GIFT to the group who is organizing the exhibition. The GIFT is one of the activist features of this project!
​Please send only small envelopes with max 4 squares at a time. It must be letters.
Please attach in the envelope some indication of the specific squares if possible: Authors name, title, date, (and brief. description if You wish so)
Please indicate the content of the letter for post and : “e.g. Postcards” the value (e.g. 1 Euro )”


Please send the printed  and signed  Consent form with the squares to the  organizers of the exhibitions  and a copy to [email protected]. You can also send photos of the squares and  process  for TC archives and to be visible in the project webpage. 

 
Some suggestions for Coordinators
If you are a group coordinator, we suggest making meetings with the participants (street actions, workshop sessions, lectures, practical lessons, etc) to explain the rationales of the Movement Textile Cartographies, and how the movement is based on the notion of gift and storytelling. Please share in a general conversation how textile materials can be produced, used and re-used, introducing concepts such as environmental sustainability, slow fashion and circular economy. You will find some ideas in the TC KIT.
 
After you can invite participants to make their squares in group or individually, coordinators will need to collect all the textile squares and send them to the Exhibition Hosts. The squares will not be returned, they will be used by the Exhibition Host to promote cultural and educational actions to make people aware about the need to rethink how humans are using textile materials; textile craftivism, story telling and silenced stories.