Cities are living archives — shaped as much by the hands that build them as by the feet that walk them and the memories they carry. This project presents a series of embroidered abstract maps created collaboratively by immigrant women living in Lisbon.
Drawing from personal geographies and collective memory, each map questions how we document, claim, and reimagine the spaces we inhabit. The embroidered cartographies challenge conventional mapping — replacing precision with feeling, data with story, borders with threads.
The diversity of embroidery techniques used in the project reflects the richness of the diasporic experience itself. Each stitch carries the memory of a different tradition — Phulkari from Punjab, Kantha from Bengal, chain stitch from East Africa — woven together into a new, shared visual language.
The process is as important as the outcome: women gather, share stories, teach each other stitches, and slowly, thread by thread, map their emotional relationship to the city they now call home.
The embroidered maps are open invitations. They ask viewers to consider what “home” means when it is no longer a fixed point on a map but a feeling, a practice, a set of relationships. Home, in these works, is something continuously stitched — never finished, always becoming.
All roads lead to home, but the road itself is the home. The journey, the making, the gathering — these are the acts of belonging that no border can contain.
