Threading Topographic Tales presents a journey through an array of intertwined narratives that come into life through their desire to create, one thread and one story at a time, new spaces of encounter. Reflecting on how to carry the multiple and entangled territories that we embody, whether it be in the form of identities, places or relations, Tania’s work unveils as an attempt to bring closer identity and geography, mainly through the gesture of embroidery. An effort to repair some of the rips and tears, to inhabit some of the cracks, to stitch the stories into the land and the land into the bodies. Focusing on latinx contemporary identities and communities, the works presented at Gallery101 express multiple embroidered narratives, presenting both bodies as a collective territory, and territories as a woven body.   

The creation of counter-cartographic textile maps, be they personal, collective or somewhere in between, enables the co-construction of alternative narratives that permeate into our ecosystems; Where space is infinitely layered and where diverse realities are carefully interwoven into each other. These counter-maps, serving as both guides to the world and active contributors to its formation, emanate from multiple and situated viewpoints, devoid of any claim to comprehensiveness or objectivity, thus becoming a part of the pluriverse—an idea that comes from the global south to challenge the notion of a singular reality and a universal truth. These diverse cartographies encapsulate not just physical landscapes but infinite layers of biodiversity, cultural identities and interconnected stories that collectively shape our understanding and our making of the world. 

Tania Lara acknowledges support from Canada Council for the Arts.