Fabrics of Memory: Interlacing Life History, Sewing Practice, and Learning Through Art

Abstract

This research investigated the possible interweavings between life history and the knowledge of a manual craft, with learning through art as its horizon. The investigation stemmed from the time spent with Lígia Hatsuko Hayashi, my paternal grandmother, a Japanese immigrant who arrived in Brazil in the 1930s and worked as a seamstress throughout her life. Through meetings in which we sewed and conversed, Lígia shared her memories with me and taught me her craft — sewing — thus activating a process of knowledge transmission that articulated technical, sensorial, and cultural aspects. The study adopted oral history and autoethnography as its primary methodologies, allowing attentive listening to individual memory as a source of knowledge and reflection. Personal documents, records, and biographical objects were gathered as analytical material, composing a narrative that engages with the social history of Japanese immigration in Brazil. The research was based on the assumption that individual memory is a constitutive part of collective memory, and that non-hegemonic narratives — such as that of an elderly, foreign woman belonging to the working class — can disrupt dominant historical discourses and practices consecrated by traditional arts. Thus, sewing, understood as a popular and feminine form of know-how, proved to be a powerful field of creation, affection, and learning. Prompted by the question “how can I learn to teach with my grandmother?”, the study reflects on the transmission of knowledge in non-school-based learning processes and its implications for Art Education, advocating the recognition of sensitive, relational experiences grounded in life trajectories as both poetic and pedagogical instruments.