Lightness and Denunciation: stitching as a feminine utopia
Basque Country International Architecture Biennale – Mugak/2025
Throughout history, the concept of utopia has been a powerful means of imagining alternative worlds and projecting fairer, more equitable, and transformative futures. However, this concept has been profoundly shaped by a masculine and Western perspective that has long dominated utopian narratives in philosophy, politics, and literature. Canonical figures of this tradition include Saint Augustine, Thomas More, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and George Orwell. But where are the utopias conceived by women? What forms might they take if imagined from different perspectives, with different kinds of knowledge and lived experiences?
One of the earliest responses to these questions can be found in the work of Christine de Pizan, a pioneer in envisioning utopia from a female perspective. In The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), de Pizan creates a symbolic city in which women are worthy of respect and play central roles in thought, education, and politics. Despite its moral and philosophical value, this work — like those of Lady Mary Chudleigh and Lucrezia Marinella — has historically been marginalised. The invisibility of these voices highlights the urgent need to revisit the history of ideas and incorporate diverse perspectives and approaches to envisioning the future.
This project — Levedad y Denuncia: El bordado como utopía en femenino — was born from the desire to challenge this exclusion. It seeks not only to give voice to those silenced in the past, but also to propose new ways of imagining utopia itself. We advocate for a democratic, sensitive, and pluralistic utopia, one that recognises care, diversity, and collective participation as fundamental pillars for shaping the future.
Design recovers stitching — a tradition historically associated with care and female artisanal production — and elevates it to the status of an architectural and political tool. This approach not only reflects on the historical absence of female authors in utopian thought, but vindicates their presence by representing a structure that symbolises the struggles for equality, justice, and creativity in the urban sphere, thus “stitching” the boundaries between tradition and innovation, and between past and future.
The tensioned textile structure, with its curved and light shapes, can accommodate different activities. It plays with tension and transparency to create an ephemeral and symbolic space for encounter. In addition, it will use 3D printing technology, an approach aligned with sustainability and the Biennial's objectives.
“The project highlights utopia from a feminist perspective, making visible how traditional practices associated with women, such as stitching, can be a means to imagine and build alternative futures”, the authors note.
The structure pays tribute to symbols such as the Tree of Gernika, the kaiku, and the railings of La Concha Beach, with frames that capture citizens' dreams and complaints about mass tourism, housing, inequality, and the loss of biodiversity. Designed as an open, flexible, and circular space, it allows for communities to be stitched together, hosting assemblies, screenings, debates, and collective childcare. Its materials are recycled: ship sails and plastics recovered from the sea. Each piece becomes a medium for both memory and protest, reminding us that to stitch is to narrate and transform. The pavilion vindicates the political value of manual and participatory work over vertical discourses and technocratic solutions. It does not promise paradise, but it invites us to build just that, stitch by stitch, from the common ground we share. A utopia stitched together by many hands, in which imagining other forms of the city is also imagining new ways of being together in the world.
