Making of A Stitch in Time, Grinning like a Cheshire cat

The connection between Cheshire cheese and the cheesy grin of Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat may be hard to establish but it helps to provide a local account of the emergence and disappearance of the famous cat while keeping the smile visible on the multicultural faces of those engaged in the conversation. Some may say this is ‘another line in the tiger’, as the saying goes in Venezuela (even though no tigers live there), to claim that all this chatter is irrelevant. And yet, even irrelevant things have to be named, called out and expressed. Sayings don’t say much but they certainly mean quite a lot.

A Stitch in Time is a durational work, combining participatory engagement, collective–making, performance and film. This project ’ draws upon the research of The Open University academics Inma Álvarez and Carlos Montoro’s AHRC-funded Language Acts and Worldmaking project, which focuses on the transformative and pivotal role of language teachers as creative mediators between languages and diverse everyday cultures. The collective stitching was facilitated by the artist Sonia Tuttiett and the whole process at Tate Exchange was captured by filmmaker Marcia Chandra.

Inma and Carlos collaborated with Counterpoints Arts team to design and produce A Stich in Time for Who Are We? Project at Tate Exchange.