Hilo Vano

My own relationship with these machines is also familial. My paternal grandmother, Leonor, worked for a period as a seamstress. Years later, her Singer remained in the house after it had lost its productive role. I became interested in that transition: the moment when a technological object stops being indispensable without ceasing to carry meaning.

I remember the machine as part of the home, but its presence also points beyond the household. Sewing could sustain a family and provide income, even as it demanded long, exhausting hours. For Leonor, it helped make a different kind of working life possible. I approach the machine through that tension between care, obligation and the capacity to change one’s circumstances.

I draw on the domestic workshop as a place where knowledge and memory are made through everyday work. Instructions, habits and small rituals can pass between women across generations, together with tools and the responsibility of earning or caring for others. These histories often remain attached to an object rather than entering an institutional account of the past.

Leonor told me that sewing had helped her accumulate enough capital to move into more profitable and less exhausting work. I do not treat that experience as a universal history of emancipation. The machine could open possibilities, but access to it was unequal, and the work itself could be demanding.

In my research, the promises made by sewing-machine advertising sit beside these lived conditions. I am interested in the difference between an idealized domestic image and the time, effort and skill that made a household economy possible.

My earlier research also drew on Donna Haraway’s attention to the social relations embedded in technologies, and on Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz’s work on media archaeology. I approach an obsolete machine as something that can be reassembled and interpreted, rather than as a technological history that has simply ended.

In sewing, the workshop—or the room in the house set aside for it—is a space occupied predominantly by women. In the workshops examined in this research, the division of work was usually established by the eldest woman in the household, or by the pace set by the employer. The space was filled with small objects characteristic of women’s production in the domestic sphere: scissors, thread and needles, fragile objects that must be handled carefully to prevent them from breaking or being lost.

Silvia Vega argues that we should identify the domestic workshop as such and recognize it as an important part of the construction of history. It was a place of shared experiences through which these women defined their bodies and their bonds.

Although the artisan’s workshop is not usually thought of as a setting for great historical events, celebrated protagonists or extraordinary occurrences, it is a place where memory is made. Sewing workshops generated forms of solidarity through which, alongside the materials, new female forms of embodiment and subjectivity emerged.

As Richard Sennett writes in The Craftsman, workshops have been a source of social cohesion through rituals of work, mentoring and the face-to-face sharing of information. The sewing workshop was also a space of women’s resistance: an opening in which women quietly claimed a place in the social sphere as protagonists of their own economies, sometimes supporting a family as its head.

Women’s work has historically been rendered invisible and used to define gender roles and stereotypes. Sewing provides use values within the domestic and family sphere, alongside a family’s basic livelihood, yet it has been overshadowed socially by work outside the home dominated by men and institutions. It is a practice filled with everyday rituals through which the body, memory and material objects that form part of seamstresses’ cultural identity are situated. Around the craft and each woman’s life, stories are stitched together: a memory woven at the margins of history with a provisional thread.

Research archive: Hilo Vano — máquina 5 — conceptual. References: Silvia Vega; Richard Sennett, The Craftsman.

Leonor, my paternal grandmother, had a Singer sewing machine with a treadle, which, like any child, I included in my games. I rarely saw my grandmother work on it. She explained that she was no longer a seamstress—a trade she had practised for several years until she accumulated enough capital to turn to other activities that were more profitable and less exhausting. Sewing involves countless hours of work.

Arinda, my maternal grandmother, was a laundress. Although a sewing machine at the beginning of the twentieth century could make a substantial difference to a family’s quality of life, it was also expensive, and not everyone could acquire one, even with a flexible payment system.

It is common to see, in some homes, a sewing machine that once belonged to a grandmother or an aunt: part of the family’s heritage, no longer in use, now another decorative object.

From the artist’s research archive: Hilo Vano — máquina 5 — conceptual.