Stitch for Change: Embroidery, Storytelling, and Collective Power

Inspired by the political textile work of Chilean arpilleras, this initiative seeks to tell stories of resilience, survival, and belonging. Through a collective and healing process of textile-making and storytelling, women from the local and refugee communities come together to share their experiences.

Hastings, a southern coastal town, is a place where the impacts of austerity and gentrification are stark and immediate, compounding decades of underinvestment. Against this backdrop, Hastings has become a site for the UK government’s dispersal policy for asylum seekers, which situates asylum accommodation, ‘moving-on,’ and housing discrimination at the heart of the country’s so-called ‘hostile environment.’

At the heart of the Stitch for Change workshops are embroidery and storytelling—powerful tools for exploring displacement, refuge, and the making of home in such a context of hostility. The workshops bring together women, including those seeking refuge and asylum in Hastings and surrounding areas, to reflect on community and superpower—whose power it is, and the power to do what.

The culmination of these workshops will be the creation of superhero capes, embroidered with personal narratives of power, community, and the experience of making home by refugee women and other urban dwellers. These capes will be exhibited at the De La Warr Pavilion on June 20, marking World Refugee Day.

Beyond the artistic artifacts, the collective nature of this work is profoundly significant. Women have come together, forming networks of conversation and shared creation, offering each other support in a time of growing hostility toward migrants and refugees. Through this process, they reaffirm that they political subjects and that they are not alone—just as women before them have done throughout history.

The Refugee Buddy Project is a refugee and migrant-led organization that stands in solidarity with people seeking refuge in Hastings, Rother, and Wealden.

About the project: REFRAME : Reframing Arrival, led by Giovanna Astolfo, with Harriet Allsopp, Stefano Mastromarino (DPU) and Estella Carpi (IRDR) examines varied forms of hosting, holding hostage, and housing across metropolitan London and the coastal city of Hastings, southern Italy and Turkey. It explores spaces of domesticity, homing, and displacement, investigating how people escape capture, navigate life, and create a sense of home—both on and off the grid. The project also interrogates the history and contemporary practice of banishment—the systematic unmaking of citizenship and creation of penal colonies—analysing how the UK, in connection with other European countries, renders arrival impossible for many migrants.