Iara Lima

Sometimes, a text is born from a mistake.

It’s been a while now, I was browsing through Spotify when I came across a song called Embryodead. But my eyes read something else: for a few seconds, I saw Embroidery.

I smiled when I realized the mix-up, but the word never left my head.

I’ve noticed this happens to me quite often. It was the same with Token and Tolkien; now it’s happened again, and there are other linguistic stumbles that will turn into texts here in the future.

Maybe my brain enjoys these little stumbles because they force two completely different ideas to meet. Anyway, that’s exactly what happened here.

Embryo comes from the Greek émbruon and means “that which grows within.” Embroidery comes from Old French embrouder and means “to ornament fabric with needle and thread.”

The words don’t share the same origin, but they ended up coming together in my head for another reason: both speak, each in its own way, about something still in formation.

The song that sparked this thought belongs to the German project :Wumpscut:. It deals with the interruption of a pregnancy; it’s a heavy piece that speaks to a feeling that the world is not a safe place. Embroidery, on the other hand, seems to move in the opposite direction.

Regardless of each thing’s core meaning, both speak of something that begins invisible, but, stitch by stitch, or week by week, transforms that possibility into presence. In the case of embroidery, before the first stitch there is only fabric; after a few hours of work, what was once just an idea slowly begins to take up space.

Maybe that’s why so many people describe the creative process as a form of gestation: before it exists publicly, it remains growing in silence.

There’s another curious detail.

During an Instagram Live by Clube do Bordado, at the 2024 Festival do Bordado, psychologist Sofia Duarte commented that embroidery is a visceral gesture, and even when we undo the stitches, the tiny needle holes continue to mark the fabric’s viscera.

Creating also leaves marks, and not every mark is destruction. Some are precisely what makes possible the emergence of a new form.

In some cases, artists use embroidery to speak of birth. I remember, for instance, the work of Veselka Bulkan, who embroidered the image of her ultrasound when she was pregnant. There, embroidery didn’t just record a pregnancy, it became part of it.

Not every gestation happens inside a body. Some happen between an idea and a notebook, or between a question and research, or, in this case, between a needle and fabric. And it’s in that place that I recognize my own work, because that is the gestation I have chosen for myself in this life.

I no longer believe I made a reading error, because my eyes found Embroidery hidden inside Embryodead precisely because both words, in completely opposite ways, speak of what is yet to be born.

One speaks of interruption. The other, of construction.

But both remind us that creating always involves going through a process.

And perhaps embroidery is exactly that: a silent way of gestating permanences.