Maison des Femmes de Schaerbeek, Brussels
Since 2018, the participatory project Ripping – Mending the Garments by artist Diana Valarezo has evolved as a process of collective creation exploring memory, migration, identity, and the experience of uprooting. The project originated with the exhibition Threads of Memory, presented as part of the Third Gathering of Women Artists of Ecuador.
As the work developed, the artist realised that she needed to share the process with other women. She therefore brought together a group of artists from diverse cultural backgrounds and artistic disciplines, creating a space for encounters in which artistic creation became intertwined with the exchange of personal experiences. The conversations that emerged from this collective process revealed the project’s true purpose: to share our stories and, together, stitch back together the nostalgia, wounds, and pain that shape the experience of migration.
The garment thus became a symbolic medium for individual and collective memories. Tearing, embroidering, and mending it evoke both the fractures caused by loss and displacement and the possibility of rebuilding connections and creating new forms of belonging.
The archive exhibition presented at the Maison des Femmes de Schaerbeek brings together eight years of this artistic and human journey. Through photographs and mnemonic records, it documents the working sessions, recording their dates, locations, participants, and significant accounts. Each record serves as a trace of these encounters, preserving fragments of shared stories as well as moments that left a particular mark on the artist’s memory.
To date, the project has encompassed 27 working sessions held in Ecuador, Belgium, the United States, France, and England, during which 605 people have contributed to the garment. This international dimension highlights the capacity of art to create spaces for listening, recognition, and solidarity beyond geographical and cultural borders.
As part of the exhibition, four participatory sessions have been organised, open to the public of the municipality of Schaerbeek and to people from elsewhere. Through embroidery and the exchange of stories related to migration, these sessions extend the process initiated in 2018, allowing new voices to become part of the work.
More than a retrospective, this archive exhibition constitutes a living memory of a process in constant transformation. The archive does more than document what has happened: it preserves the traces of a shared experience and makes visible a community built through listening, gesture, and words.
In Tearing – Mending the Garments, mending does not mean erasing wounds, but acknowledging and sharing them, and discovering, through the collective act of repair, the possibility of weaving new relationships. The garment thus becomes a territory of memory and resistance, where individual stories intertwine to give shape to a shared experience.
