Caroline Marim, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco/UFPE, Brazil:
The first affective editing tool I experienced was sewing, while I was playing with the scraps scattered on the floor by my mother’s sewing machine, or while playing with leather punching in my father’s shop. However, it was while studying at Angel Vianna Dance School, immersed in the process of healing the wounds of the insistent moral, sexual and epistemic abuse that a woman can experience throughout her personal and professional life, that I started the project Real’s Seams, as my first creation the series Vestindo Peles (Wearing skins) [1]. Concepts were cut on the bias to be embroidered on the body and experimented in contact with different internal and external surfaces. Since then, the seams have become the affective path (method) for the weaving of a sensitive philosophy, which welcomes narratives based on affective epistemological seams that have been guiding not only my process of eternal construction and reconstruction of the self and healing of wounds but have also focused on enabling other women to operate epistemic healing. The sewing of narratives situated in personal affective experiences is, above all, a methodology of living writing, to keep ourselves alive, capable of embodying our presence lovingly in the craftsmanship of the construction of knowledge and our life stories. Wearing skins also presents itself as sewing of concepts, which seeks to affirm a texture of thought, where writing and thinking happen in movement (Manning), of thinking the world as a space of composition in which concepts are malleable and thoughts become sensations (Whitehead). In this context, the skin is a network, which selects and allows itself to be embroidered with threads, movements, emotions and sensations, providing a holding surface, while allowing it to be played by retracing and weaving new boundaries so that curing takes place in the sewing process. Speculative dermatology in which the skin presents itself not only as the sensitive, which is the domain of contagion, of what touches and is touched but of the contact that sets limits to each new texture.