Get together. Sew up. Weave a canvas that you fill the holes, putting a patch, where someone had torn the fabric. Between sewing not human relations there is a special common thread, made up of contacts and intertwining. That heal. That’s what the activist must have thought Afro-Colombian Virgelina Chará that, while the Colombian armed conflict still bleeds the country despite the peace agreements between the government and the Farc-Ep of 2016, is carrying out a project to promote reconciliation and memory of the victims through sewing, in order to respond to the need for truth and justice.
Almost 70 years old, a face marked by the hardships of a difficult yet sunny country in her calm expression, Virgelina, recognized leader of the peace movement and human rights, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, is today the most visible figure ofSewing Union (Unione dei Sarti), an association founded in 2014, which has created a welcoming space – inside the Casa della Pace in Bogotà – where victims, especially women, can tell their stories and pass on the memory of what happened.
“Sewing means repairing a country broken by conflict, generating awareness and knowledge at the same time, and telling Colombia that we want the truth ”says Virgelina Chará. She that she has learned to sew and mend her life too over the years. Born in 1953 in Suárez (department of Cauca), mother of seven children, Chará was twice forcibly forced toax his house and he has repeatedly faced threats and intimidation. In 1985 the first episode: from Suarez he had to flee to Santiago de Cali, a district of Aguablanca, where most of the people displaced by violence live. In 2000, however, Chará was forced to change residence again, moving to Bogotà, after having denounced the gods criminal groups who, with the approval of some members of the army, dedicated themselves to the recruitment of young people in his neighborhood. However, the threats and intimidation of his person continued, without however breaking Chará’s resistance and iron will.
Under his leadership, the Union of Tailors has already carried out high-impact initiatives, such as the covering with huge pieces of hand-sewn fabric of the Memorial located in the Memory, Peace and Reconciliation Center (September 2018) and the Castle of the Arts in 2021. Now the new and ambitious project is that of a cover with canvases of memory (arropamiento con telas de la memorias) of the Justice palace of Bogotá. A community and symbolic act that will be celebrated 37 years after the M-19 guerrillas forcibly occupied the building, causing a conflict that led to the building’s fire and the death of over 100 people.
In all it is about 166,000 square meters of embroidered canvas by the so-called “itinerant tailors and seamstresses” from all over the world to cover the Palace of Justice. A titanic enterprise, with huge costs that will be incurred thanks to the sale of products that can be purchased in the various meeting points of the Union of Tailors throughout the country: clothes, dolls and accessories made by hand. Meanwhile, as if to symbolically testify to the fruit of the struggles in Chará, following the last elections on 19 June, France Marquéz will be seated in the vice-presidency chair. It will be up to you, as well as the new president, Gustavo Petroto welcome this request for reconciliation, truth and justice that comes from thousands of women and men, activists, activists and community leaders who have put their feelings and their memories on the canvas.