The Hottentot Venus was a stage name of Sarah (known as Saartije) Baartman, a Khoikhoi (by white Europeans described as Hottentot) woman brought from South Africa to be displayed as a scientific curiosity or, in fact, a sexual freak in shows in London and Paris at the beginning of the 19th century. Calling her ‘Venus’, the goddess of love and beauty, suggests her body should be admired and adored. On the contrary, it was considered ‘other’ (than the white European) norm) and abused, exploited and turned into an object of leering. Her body became a map of unjust narratives of commodification and colonial exploitation of black womanhood. 
Practices of othering women’s bodies are culturally specific and raise a number of complex issues. The ‘other’ female body is often considered shameful and excessive. Małgorzata Markiewicz and Joanna Rajkowska propose to stitch and/or unstitch narratives concerning the female body, its assault and abuse deriving from male originated rituals and conventions. Ushirika cooperative proposed by Markiewicz and Rajkowska for The Razem Pamoja Foundation is a meeting space for individuals and their cultural ecologies. It arose from the pressing need to conceptualize new ways of working, which are dictated not by maximizing profit, but the pleasure of collaboration and forging and cultivating relationships with the environment, human an non-human. It enables ironic and often humorous subversion and performative critique of xenophobic discourses and colonial relations of exploitation and violence present within different cultural tropes. Ushirika uses fabric as a strategy for subversion and political engagement with issues around women’s bodies, sexuality and its oppressive mechanics and politics but also labour force. It challenges the circulation of geo-political and corporeal economies through narratives surrounding a violated female body. Stitching might be seen as a practical action but it is also a narrative and metaphor for a passage, healing and meaning-making. Markiewicz and Rajkowska use the ritual of stitching as a metaphor for suturing social relations to create a ‘texual cloth’. They invite and join women from Nairobi to undo tight and oppressive cultural tropes through suturing. This act is not based on outside intervention to change ways in which certain groups are viewed as un-able but to allow for the fabric to be mended from an internal location within a given culture.

Basia Śliwińska