Threads of Life

I, Moon, want to tell you a story I saw reflected in the water of a lagoon.

Around its shore lived a group of women who spent their days watching and stitching what they saw.

Their needles traced the canoes that crossed the water at dawn. The fishermen with their nets. The smoke rising from the kitchens. The festivals, with their dances and their masks. The flocks climbing the hillside.

They embroidered because, into every garment, they sewed a small piece of life.

Their story lived in their work. The afternoon a grandmother taught her neighbor to embroider. The day the firstborn grew and there was nothing for swaddling. The hour when the light shifted over the water.

One of those nights, as I leaned out over the lagoon, I saw something strange. The cloths, hung to dry between the trees, seemed to stir though no wind blew. The embroidered water rippled. The fish appeared to swim. Smoke from the embroidered kitchens rose along the fabric as if a fire burned beneath.

The garments held what they saw. And sometimes, on clear nights, they gave it back.

I don’t know what became of those cloths. But I do know this: into each one, the women had sewn a small piece of life. And a small piece of life, once embroidered, never fades.

Process

For our Collaboration 60, Spanish artist Aitor Saraiba returns to Loona for the third time. After his debut in Collaboration 31, where he showed three textile artworks and a series of scapulars, and his second appearance in Collaboration 48, working alongside Chiapas artisans through the Dos Tierras platform, this new chapter rounds out a trilogy that has taken Aitor across Mexico by way of embroidery.

This time, the destination was Michoacán. Before setting out, the artist already had a feeling for what was waiting: “I love Michoacán embroidery—the way it tells stories, its colors and stitches. I’ve always felt that kind of storytelling has a lot to do with my own work. I think something beautiful will come out of this trip,” he told us when the previous Collaboration was announced.

The first thread of this story, though, wasn’t spun in Michoacán but in Mexico City. At an edition of Original, Sharon—Loona’s founder—stopped by the Bordados Nuevo Rodeo stand and met Enedina Lara Granados, who runs the workshop. Bordados Nuevo Rodeo is a group of women who live and work in the community of Nuevo Rodeo, in the municipality of Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán, on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro.

Enedina learned bordado de historia—story embroidery—from doña Chonita, a neighbor, right after her first daughter was born, when she needed to earn money. She started with coasters and smaller pieces, then moved on to blouses, skirts, rebozos, and huipiles.

Today the workshop sets down the life of its people on handwoven cotton: fishing on the lake, the milpa, festivals, Day of the Dead, the kitchen, the dances. “We put down stories from our beautiful state, so rich in culture,” Enedina says. “In every piece we leave a little bit of our life.”

Her favorite saying gets at it best: “Embroidering stories is like cooking—you season each piece. The way you sprinkle salt into a soup, that’s how the work goes.”

After Sharon and Enedina first met, Loona made the next meeting happen. The artist traveled from his cabin in the woods of Cantabria all the way to Nuevo Rodeo, where he spent days with the embroiderers in their homes and kitchens.

Out of that time together, each side took up its part: they brought scenes from daily life onto cloth—canoes on the lake, dances, markets, flocks, kitchens—and Aitor added phrases in his signature handwriting: Viva la vida. Rema conmigo. Eterno. Luz. Sé valiente.

Aitor describes this way of working as a steady part of his practice. “It’s a process I’ve been doing for many years now,” he told us during his previous Collaboration. “When it’s born, it’s beautiful, because you don’t know where it’s going. It’s a living creature that a group of people shapes—without ego, only with love and patience.”

The result: eight morrales, two huipiles, and a series of embroidered panels. The pieces carry the marks of Michoacán’s bordado de historia—small figures, scene-by-scene storytelling, saturated color—and Aitor’s handwriting runs across them like a message. The embroidered panels will then travel to Spain, where the artist will turn them into two textile works that will join his body of work.

For Enedina, this Collaboration brings a long-held wish closer. “My biggest dream is to take my work to other countries, to see people wearing bordado de historia made with love, hope, art, and dedication,” she says.

The Collaboration launches on June 4 at the Museo del Traje in Madrid—the first time the work of Bordados Nuevo Rodeo crosses the Atlantic.

This Collaboration continues the cycle Aitor began with Loona in his earlier appearances. Three chapters, three communities of artisans, one shared pursuit: bringing together, through textile, what seemed to stand apart. As he himself puts it: “There’s an invisible thread tying us together, making us all brothers and sisters.”

With this Collaboration, Loona renews its commitment to artists and artisans who, in their daily practice, hold up textile craft as a bridge between cultures, generations, and geographies.