Art & Craft 2023 – 2024
by Vanesa Maidana
On Tuesday 17th of December, the last meeting of the Art and Crafts of the 2024 cycle took place.
Art, Crafts and Gossips started back at the beginning of 2023.
It began as a space to create our first Latinas Stand of the International Women’s Day on the City Council (but that will require a different entry!). We wanted to create together, through art, something that could represent us in that diverse and wonderful event.
So, we started getting around an art table, women from different countries, creating with our hands a map, with their colours, highs and lows, mountains, islands, and green areas. The result was wonderful and lasting! Not only because that map that bonded us together in that wintery month of February was still in good shape at our Annual Meeting 2024 but also because we realized that what we created was not only a map. It was a healing space, where we could laugh, talk, cry, channel our knowledge and share with other Latin American women. We couldn’t leave it only for those meetings to do something punctual like the Representation of International Women’s Day: we needed to make it regularly.
We kept going to St Paul’s learning centre for a while. Every week we were there. Not always the same women, but we knew that no matter who showed up, it was always a fulfilling and warm gathering. We shared our happiness, and our sorrows and we grew strong as a community.
After a while, we had to move our meetings to St Werburghs Community Center. Still once a week, still with the same joy of sharing time, arts and crafts. That space held us in April and March of 2024.
In June 2024 we moved to Arnolfini. And we have been there since then. Every Tuesday, we meet. It’s different when we are getting late, and you can hear the laughter and the different accents coming from the second floor. You know that your community is there, being loud, being themselves, sharing precious time, perhaps learning a new skill, perhaps just sharing sweet treats. Being there. We have us.
The Arts and Crafts meetings, for me, mean exactly that. Community. We hold ourselves. Being able to share with other women in our language, in a country that is not our own, has something magical because it allows me to reconnect with myself and others and to find a sense of belonging and home.
