Alex Farrar’s practice is based on the artistic use of the exhibition form as a shared space to consider the intimate, feelingful ways in which we embody social, political, environmental and economic realities.

For this project, Alex Farrar worked in collaboration with embroiderer Maria da Conceição Mansinho, artisan Ana Medeiros and artisan and textile researcher Sofia Silva to form an open embroidery workshop. The act of embroidering was highlighted as a relational and social practice in which the agency and participation of diverse forms of knowledge produce a practical essay on communality. For nine days, vaga’s gallery-space was transformed into a meeting point for understanding and exploring embroidery’s relationship to labour, to the hand-made, to the industrial, to free time, to ceremony, family, men, women, tradition, modernity, cultural identity, symmetry, asking what embroidery is, what it could be, and what common spaces are, or could be. The exhibition presents and continues this process.