Environment featured

Repair Café & Darning the Planet

July 26, 2024

Getting dressed is a universal human trait, but the textile industry is collapsing environmental systems everywhere. Relearning basic skills and taking back the agency in what we wear and how we wear it is an act of resistance and an invitation to reimagine ways to inhabit the planet.

Repair Café & Darning the Planet practice will help you learn specific skills for visibly mending your own clothes and textiles in community. It will also encourage you to reflect about what making an item of clothing means.

Zurciendo el planeta (Darning the Planet) creates spaces to learn and practice various mending and recreation techniques, responding to the specific needs of the garments that participants want to mend.

These encounters offer the opportunity for people of diverse geographies and ages to use the act of dressing to imagine a different way of inhabiting the planet.

In these gatherings, we share experiences on important topics related to clothing: dressing as an act of ancestral subsistence vs. modern consumerism, programmed obsolescence, pollution through the textile industry, repair as an act of resistance, exploitation of resources, among others.

Each meeting/workshop begins with a brief presentation on the importance of reducing our consumption, the impact of textile waste, planetary limits and Transition movement.

Then we move on to the ‘example of the day’ which can be the repair of socks, jeans, crotches, blouses, knitted garments, also patches and interventions of clothes with artivist proposals.

From this demonstration the participants will start their own repairs and will be accompanied by questions to open the dialogue between the participants.

Part of the Zurciendo el planeta community

Zurciendo el planeta is an inspiring initiative in the service of collective transition, which is part of the international movement known as Repair Cafe, where people come together to share their skills to recover and repair all kinds of objects. This time we will focus on textile practice.

We have more than 15 years of experience using embroidery and textile art not only to repair, decorate or present a project but as a social tool to approach all types of communities to open dialogue, questioning, sharing of knowledge that allow us to know the needs of the community to generate regenerative projects, the creation of networks and alliances to imagine and build another possible world  regenerating  the social fabric.


Join the online webinar

Repair Café & Darning the Planet · Aug 7th

Dora and Anahi from Zurciendo el Planeta will be facilitating this session. You’ll learn how to create a Repair Café space that offers

  • tools to repair and repurpose garments,
  • welcoming vibes for people to hear and share inspiring stories of transition and imagination
  • share and learn about the transition movement and its practical projects

Event info and booking

Join us on August 7th at 18:00 Universal Time Coordinated for an engaging webinar designed to explore Repair Café & Darning the Planet and how to put that in practise.

This session will be held in Spanish with live interpretation to English.

Please contact us to [email protected] if you’d like to support live interpretation into another language yourself or have a contact who could do it. Thank you!

Diving deeper

Master the art of Repair Café & Darning the Planet

You can use the below resources to become more skilled at this. Explore them at your own leisure, before or after checking out the workshop happening on August 7th.

Stay engaged

Opportunities to keep connected and learn more

The Transition Movement Virtual Platform can provide opportunities to keep in touch and keep exploring this topic together.

Also, Zurciendo el Planeta currently runs workshops mainly in person (Mexico City, Buenos Aires) but would be happy to develop more online events. Some ideas:

  • Collective embroidering installation on how do we imagine a Transition town/solar punk in collaboration with Zurciendo el planeta initiative.
  • Stitching can also be a healing practice: workshop on grief work for the planet through mending.

Websites and Social media of interest:

Transición México website
Zurciendo el planeta website
Zurciendo el planeta Instagram
Zurciendo el planeta Facebook

Anahi Martinez Encinas

Systemic Artivist. Solar Punk. Member of Transition Mexico Hub. Creator and facilitator of learning processes, educational models and Systemic Laboratory of Imagination.