Walking Seminar |Silent Stories: Acts of ResilienceFaial, Azores, Portugal 9-13 April 2026.2/6/2026 
This walking seminar will be in person, in the island at Faial, near the city of Horta, the main venue is the Recycling Centre RESIAÇORES - Fajã da Praia do Norte, Horta Faial 9April- Thursday- Setting theExhibition (praia Norte )- Walking tour in Horta /Welcome Dinner 10April- Friday- Setting theExhibition (praia Norte)- Workshop with a communuty- Derive in Faial 11April-Derive in Pico 12April- Sunday- Conference and Exhibition (praia Norte) 13 April – Monday- Last Derive 
OpeningTextile cartographies resides in the middle of art, education and social justice. At this moment, we attend to acts of resilience. From one side we have the climate emergency in the planet. 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.
Keywords: Clothing labels; third world labour; visual inquiry; collage, fragment Abstract : We align ourselves with a pluralistic and collaborative movement of Textiles Cartographies, which has an ethical and environmental stance based on collective care. This work exists and insists on micropolitics and art as practices where the Textiles Cartographies project implies, above all, social and cultural participation that involves communities impacted by environmental and social disasters. This presentation maps our relationships to textile production, in order to address the precariousness of fast-fashion and the implications for third-world labor.To articulate this position, we share two nodes of ‘label’ inquiry (Anita and Rita) with the responsiveness of a line-a-day as a performative gesture (Isabel), to explore our microscripts of fast fashion, and how we render our living inquiry with object itineraries, or simply, the clothes off our backs. Anita’s project began in her doctoral program, and came to fruition twenty-four years later under the auspices of Textile Cartographies. From the late 1990s onward, and with an artist’s attention to practice, Anita rigorously and without exception collected only the labels of garments that were sent to the landfill. Tracing the movement of fabric through the hands and over the body, this serves as an artful commentary on internationalising taken-for-granted attire. However, like a cloak of revelations on recycling, Anita discovered that since this project began, she had only a small handful of labels to attest to fast fashion.Rita’s project began with earlier Textile Cartography invitations, and was further prompted by Anita’s artistic response focused on clothing labels. A world traveler and a thrift shop user, Rita’s clothing isn’t brand oriented but is often purchased for its uniqueness and its low cost. After investigating where her clothing originated and how that might correspond with her own international interests, it was illuminating to learn that while many articles of clothing originated from countries she had been, others did not. Focused on the latter countries, she considers how the textile trade has an invisible genealogy ultimately produced to be forgotten and wasted. Rita attempts to place these invisible origins at the centre of her Textile Cartography square explorations, inviting further questions.In response, Isabel writes a text as a collage of textile fragments, a juxtaposition of isolated ideas from different places that are momentarily sewn together and then return to their places of origin. Fragmentary writing is an attempt to encompass the whole in parts, a juxtaposition of ideas constructed like a fabric over the course of days. The marking is of a day, a torment and the expiration/inspiration of the calendar, frequency, continuity, and discipline. Each note arises from a fragmentary idea based on the daily making of fabrics. The attempt is to write a performative text, and as a performative gesture of ‘1 per day’ and the Textiles Cartographies.
The climate catastrophe forseen by scientists and thinkers since the 1970s is now upon us. Torrential rains, forest fires, reduced aquifer reserves, loss of biodiversity, and soil depletion are some of the episodes that make up the ‘tasting menu’ of planetary degradation governed and sponsored by the only animal species capable of generatingsuch an overwhelming predatory outbreak. The impact of our actions is so profound thatit has earned its own geological name:the Anthropocene; a path of destruction anchored in an economic system driven by the exploitation of natural bodies – water, soil, plantsand animals – as well as subjectivities and their creations, Capitalism.The process of exploitation also entails the expropriation, oppression and subjugation of more than human beings. The exploitation of finite materials and living beings (animate and inanimate) transforms everything and everyone into commodities. This includes the insistence on the production of fossil fuels, the consumption of superfluous and disposable items (many of which are designed for planned obsolescence), unlimitedprofit placed above any living species, including our own. We aim to investigate and reflect on a plural and collaborative movementthat has an ethical-environmental stance in collective care: Ecofeminism. This movement is led by women whose horizon of action and existential, political, social,and artistic platform is the overthrow of a patriarchal global governance system basedon oppression and individualism, which for centuries has operated through theexploitation of the working class and the natural environment. Ecofeminism emerges inopposition to these destructive forces, proposing alternatives to the plans for thepermanence of a system that, in order to sustain itself, has no alternative but to destroyin order to continue operating.As artist-teachers-researchers, and based on our daily experiences and attempts to remain on the planet, we join the reflections and actions of women who insist on combating the ‘colonial-pimping unconscious’ (ROLNIK, 2018) and on writing a history that runs counter to the ideas advocated by capitalism and by a sickeningsystem. References KRENAK, Ailton. Ideas for postponing the end of the world. São Paulo: Companhia dasLetras, 2019. STENGERS, Isabelle. In times of catastrophe: resisting the approaching barbarism.São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2015.
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