south/south dialogues

Cross-Stitches That Bind Us Together: Embroidering in Ukraine and Palestine

by Yuliia Kishchuk

This essay explores embroidery as a feminist, political, and epistemic practice that resists erasure and imperial violence. This text traces how textile practices — often dismissed as naïve, feminine, and apolitical — have long functioned as forms of meaning-making, counter-archiving, and resistance. Moving between Ukrainian and Palestinian contexts, the essay weaves together personal experience, feminist theory, craft studies, and history to show how embroidery preserves memory, a close relationship with landscapes and community, disrupted by war, displacement, and colonial modernity. From matrilineal traditions of vyshyvka and tatreez to their politicisation under Soviet collectivisation, the Nakba, and contemporary occupation, textiles emerge as sites where marginalised voices — those of peasants, working-class women, prisoners, and diasporic communities — could “speak” when other forms of expression were censored. Embroidery, when unlearned from nationalist and capitalist logics, becomes a practice of radical world-making — one that refuses the separation of aesthetics and politics and offers a fragile but vital thread of transnational feminist solidarity between Ukraine and Palestine.

This essay is part of our south/south dialogues: Beyond the colonial vortex of the ‘West’: Subverting non-western imperialisms before and after 24 February 2022.

“We have to revive our muscular memory. The memory of us before we were made into types, before we were taxonomies,” says Ariella Aїsha Azoulay, as she learns to make the traditional Middle Eastern jewellery her Jewish Arab ancestors have crafted for centuries. This moment was, for me, the highlight of Azoulay’s recent film, A World Like a Jewel in the Hand: Unlearning Imperial Plunder. Her words, so carefully put into thought-provoking questions and reflections, lingered in my mind long after the film ended. Embroidery and other textile techniques are often dismissed as feminine, naïve, or folk crafts (Jones 2022), considered far removed from sophisticated contemporary politicised art practices. Yet, when examining the long histories of embroidery in Ukraine and Palestine, one can see its subtle yet profound political potential. I think alongside Azoulay and many others, in these complex matters of how to inhabit marginal spaces of major issues, how to envision connections in the ruptured world, where Ukraine and Palestine are constantly pitted against each other.  I think with a needle and a thread that binds into a cross-stitch, combining histories of imperialisms and feminist resistances to it. 

I am not alone in thinking about crafts as an undervalued artistic practice. Across different fields, artists, activists, historians of art and women, anthropologists, and critical theorists engage with craft studies to explore its cultural, economic, and social potential. One such community is the Stitched Voices Collective, based in Aberystwyth, Wales. Stitched Voices is a reflective space, articulated through a blog, that examines the political role of textiles. It pays particular attention to contexts shaped by violence and militarisation, connecting places such as Northern Ireland, Catalonia, Chile, Wales, and Colombia. The blog post grew out of an exhibition. Now it  reflects on gender-based violence, drone warfare, nuclear arms, and torture (Andrä, de Guevara, Cole, House 2020). Similar engagements can be found in the Ukrainian context. In 2017, the Centre for Visual Culture in Kyiv hosted TEXTUS. Embroidery, Textile, Feminism, an exhibition curated by Oksana Briukhovetska. The participating artists reimagined embroidery as a critical instrument — one that could be used to think with and about gender, power, and artistic hierarchies.

Within critical craft studies, textiles are often approached as forms of everyday meaning-making. Susan Jones, a scholar of fibre crafts, points out that text and textile share the same Latin root, carrying meanings of “fabric,” “connection,” and “interwoven.” For Jones (2022), the historical marginalisation of fibre crafts has paradoxically strengthened their communicative power, making them an important resource for gender and social historians. Following this strand, I approach embroidery as a form of knowledge-making and counter-archiving, borrowing the term from the Syrian-Palestinian artist and scholar Nour Shantout. Seen this way, embroidery emerges as a marginalised mode of knowledge production — one that preserves experiences that might otherwise be censored or disappear. In Ukrainian and Palestinian contexts, embroidery is transmitted matrilineally as both labour and knowledge. It also functions as a space of politicisation and as an archive for those who left behind no written records: working-class peasants, mothers, and grandmothers struggling to make ends meet.

My interest in embroidery started four years ago. Back in 2022, three months into the full-scale invasion, I began to slowly feel my body. It ached — stifled and exhausted from constant worry and sleepless nights. Back then I was stuck in Vienna, finishing my master’s degree at Central European University. My mind had been consumed entirely by thoughts of friends and family in Ukraine, finalising assignments, and contemplating what would come next. I had never felt so alienated. I needed a grounding practice, and here it was: embroidering. Looking back, I realise this impulse to ground oneself in crafting was common among my friends and acquaintances — some took up knitting, others sewing or pottery-making.

My perception of embroidery changed in the spring of 2022, during the last week of Ramadan, when my friend invited me to a BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—a group protesting Israeli occupation) tatreez workshop in Vienna. Tatreez is a centuries-old Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery craft. As I picked up the canvas, needle, and threads, I realised I actually knew how to do it. My mother taught me embroidery when I was little, and then I also learned it at school. There, at the workshop in Vienna, even the patterns felt familiar. I had seen similar patterns in Ukrainian embroidery books and on my own embroidered attire. While Ukrainian embroidery techniques, colours, and patterns vary by region, its “canonical” representation often features red and black threads on a white canvas. Tatreez, with its subtle threads of solidarity, appeared when I needed it most. There, in a distant district of Vienna, in a building that reminded me of my school, I felt unexpectedly at home among the Palestinian diaspora.

When thinking about artisan crafts, we are often conditioned to focus on their uniqueness, authenticity, and exceptionalism — values that have emerged from long and painful nation-building processes, particularly for communities that remained stateless for extended periods and are still frequently compelled to assert their right to exist. Yet, the threads of imagination can lead us elsewhere: to the tales of connectivity, resistance, and solidarity. But what, exactly, makes textiles political? How can we understand this alongside the often-forgotten or neglected practices of needlework? I find myself, like Azoulay and many others, grappling with these complex questions: How can we reimagine “traditional crafts” in a way that they keep their radical political power? How could textiles become our thread of feminist (and beyond) solidarity and collective resistance?

I consciously use the term feminisms in the plural, as there is no singular, all-encompassing feminism but rather a multitude of worldviews and practices. My own understanding and practice of feminism is rooted in intersectionality, democratic socialism, and environmentalism. These perspectives inform my approach to reading and interpreting documents and texts from the past. For many years, however, I separated my “political and scholarly” self from my “arts and crafts” one, believing these two worlds could not collide. I even felt a certain guilt for enjoying traditional crafts, given how they were often used and abused by far-right ideologies. Since 2016, I have been unable to wear a vyshyvanka, as it has taken on a heavy ethnonationalist connotation. The slogans like “Vyshyvanka is the code of a nation” are both ahistorical and antischolarly; they fuel racism and xenophobia by dividing Ukrainians, the political community based on civic rights and responsibilities, into “pure” and “impure.” In response, I felt compelled to re-examine these meanings, and turned to the long, complex histories of embroidery rooted in place and kin, not a primordial fantasy of a centuries-long nation. These stories are still short and fragmented, but they might help us to imagine otherwise.

Tatreez was traditionally known as fallahi, a term signifying a farm worker closely tied to the soil (Alqasas 2024). The primary source of inspiration for both Palestinian and Ukrainian embroidery has historically been the land itself: its landscapes, plants, and trees. Each region in Ukraine and Palestine had its own designs and colours, closely tied to the architecture, landscape, and everyday life. Before Soviet collectivisation, which caused a human-made famine in 1932–1933 and claimed around three and a half million Ukrainian lives, Ukrainians were predominantly farmers and peasants. In some way, such a way of living continued, however, in the format of collective farms. In this sense, embroidery functions as a text that remembers what Bruno Latour (2013) calls earthbound, both central to Ukrainian and Palestinian ways of being together with the land and other species, relationships disrupted by industrialisation. Soviet collectivisation and the Nakba, which forced the displacement and mass killings of Palestinians in 1948, politicised and accelerated the meaning of the embroidery, making it a central identity marker for both diasporic communities and those who remained at home. For the displaced Palestinian communities in exile, tatreez became an instrument to counter erasure and dispossession (Siage 2025). Women have long practiced Palestinian embroidery, passing it from mother to daughter (Alqasas 2024). Similarly, in Ukraine vyshyvka is primarily a female practice, often creating spaces where women could gather to spend time together: crafting, sharing news, and gossiping.

In the early Ukrainian feminist movement, vyshyvka and larger textile production played a pivotal role. That time also marks a strong union between feminism and socialism, which was on the rise all across the European continent.  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, socialist ideas were more common than exceptional among the younger generation of Ukrainian cultural and political figures, such as Lesya Ukrainka, Mykhailo Drahomanov, Natalia Kobrynska, Mykhailo Pavlyk, and Serhii Podolynskyy. Many Ukrainian activists of the early 20th century gained their first experiences in political participation and writing within socialist movements, and the feminist movement was no exception. While crucial figures such as Lesya Ukrainka and Natalia Kobrynska are well-known, here I want to highlight a lesser-known figure: Anna Pavlyk (1855–1928). Pavlyk, a socialist feminist and active participant in the early feminist movement in Halychyna, was largely self-educated, supported by her brother Mykhailo Pavlyk in lieu of formal university training. She was a woman from a peasant background. Anna Pavlyk contributed to Pershyy Vinok, the first feminist almanac. Pavlyk’s feminist writing was deeply informed by her socialist beliefs.

In her lecture, gender historian Alla Shvets tells a story about the sewing machine that Mykhailo Dragomanov gifted to Anna Pavlyk, which then supported her financially for a long period of time. Anna was also teaching various textile productions to young women in the Kosiv region, now the Ukrainian Carpathians. In 1878, Anna Pavlyk was arrested by Lviv police for gathering village girls from Kosiv and neighboring villages under the pretext of teaching them sewing, allegedly to “carry on socialist propaganda” (Himka 1983). She was imprisoned for a month. Sewing provided not only practical skills for earning a basic income but also an avenue for politicisation, fostering awareness of social and national liberation, issues tightly intertwined at the end of the 19th century. Reflecting on this now, sewing, knitting, embroidery, and broader textile production emerge as vernacular forms through which peasant and working-class women not only earned some minimal income. Through accessible, artistic practices, women claimed both creative and political space, claiming power within the limitations imposed upon them.

Collective practices of embroidering also played a crucial role in Stalinist Gulag camps, where the imprisoned Ukrainian women were stripped of their multiple identities. There, embroidery came in hand. Women gathered to make a collective canvas where they could express themselves. Oksana Kis, a gender historian and anthropologist, writes about such a canvas as a powerful form of resistance. In her book “Survival as a Victory”, Kis (2021) states that in Stalinist Gulag camps, embroidery became a crucial instrument of women’s resistance to everyday dehumanisation and terror.

These women were embroidering the collective canvas that combined various symbols, slogans with fishbones or matchsticks (Kis 2021, 293). Unlike writing, embroidered canvas was considered naïve and less serious; therefore, they were not censored in the same way writings were — it allowed a space for the political protest to be exercised.

One such powerful example is documented in the story of Odosia Plytka-Sorokhan, a writer from Kryvorivnia. She leaves testimonies from one of the harshest labour camps at Kolyma, where she worked at the uranium mines. For her, embroidering was one of the ways to help her cope with the constant erasure — she used threads from her own clothing and made needles out of fish bones.

Similarly, Palestinian women started to embroider banned Palestinian flags on their attire, which was less censored by the Israeli government (Khurana 2024, 17). These examples illustrate how the perception of traditional crafts as naïve and apolitical was subverted and used by the marginalised communities. Syrian-Palestinian artist Nour Shantout uses tatreez as an ancestral feminist strategy to resist Israeli occupation, stitching the same flowers women in Palestine have embroidered for generations alongside the Palestinian flag, which was often forbidden. Such combinations echo the radical political potential of embroidery. Nour theorises on tatreez as a form of the counter-archive, where knowledge is passed on matrilineally, and preserved in the form of embroidery. Describing her practices, she writes:

In the case of the Palestinian community in diaspora, one of the forms of storytelling which has survived until the present day is teaching embroidery through storytelling. Embroidery had always been around me before I learned that it is a form of Indigenous knowledge production. My grandmother would wear the embroidered dress as a political statement against settler colonialism. She was stitching the map of Palestine before colonization as a practice of resistance, while my grandfather was engaged in militant political work.

In like manner, Ukrainian-Palestinian artist Alina El Assadi searched for a symbol that would encompass her complex Ukrainian-Palestinian identity and found it in embroidery and watermelons. By stitching the skin of dried watermelons and melons, she combines two contexts into one, through both the embroidery and the symbol of a watermelon, so crucial for both Ukraine and Palestine. For Alina, it is a way to simultaneously talk about Ukraine and Gaza as both face harsh bombings and occupation, but also to bridge the connections and spread awareness about wars that are usually pitted against each other on social media and beyond. In her practice, the connectivity presents a possibility to think through the challenging and complicated ways to build a grassroots solidarity between Ukrainians and Palestinians.

Back in 2022, I was the only Ukrainian at a Palestinian tatreez workshop. However, I felt a strong resonance with the casual chats about land-grabbing, dispossession, and occupation. At the same time, I felt a certain level of guilt that Ukrainian refugees in Vienna were granted rights and treatment that the Palestinian community still tries to achieve after years in exile. There, I understood that real solidarity is impossible without uncomfortable and painful conversations about acknowledging one’s privileges and, even if conditional, whiteness. Looking back at 2023, when I started to sketch this text for the first time, I was much more hopeful about the possibility of such solidarity. Now, when survival is the top priority, there is not much energy left to build transnational bridges. I hope that one day it will change. Maybe then, crafting spaces and workshops will come in handy.

Embroidery, when unlearned from the logics of nationalism, exceptionalism, and capitalist modernity, emerges as a practice of radical world-making. It refuses to separate aesthetics from politics, domesticity from public struggle, or manual labour from intellectual production. As a counter-archive, it records the histories of touch, endurance, and belonging that imperial and national archives could not, or refuse to, preserve. To embroider is to think through matter — to produce knowledge through care and repetition, to sustain resistance where language fails. The needle and thread have the potential to draw together dispersed struggles into a fabric of feminist solidarity that exceeds borders. ∎

Works Cited 

Andrä, Christine, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Lydia Cole, and Danielle House. “Knowing through Needlework: Curating the Difficult Knowledge of Conflict Textiles.” Critical Military Studies, vol. 6, nos. 3–4, 2020, pp. 341–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2019.1692566.

Alqasas, Batool. Tatreez as Archive: Spatializing the Palestinian Diaspora. PhD dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2024. https://hdl.handle.net/10012/21137.

Himka, John-Paul. Socialism in Galicia: The Emergence of Polish Social Democracy and Ukrainian Radicalism, 1860–1890. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Jones, Susan. “Knitting and Everyday Meaning-Making.” Textile, 2022, pp. 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2022.2092967.

Khurana, Amita. “The Power of Tatreez: Transformations in Politics and Practice Post-1948.” Afkar, vol. 6, no. 1, 2024, pp. 13–28.

Kis, Oksana. Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag. Harvard University Press, 2021.

Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature. Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, 2013.

Siage, Reem. Handbook of Rahmah: Palestinian Practices, Lifeworlds, Love and Resistance. PhD dissertation, Carleton University, 2025.

About the contributor

Yuliia Kishchuk is a multidisciplinary researcher whose work moves across environmental humanities, critical craft studies, and the history of late socialism. She holds an MA in Gender History from the Central European University and is currently pursuing a PhD at Södertörn University in Sweden. Her doctoral research examines artisan communities in the Ukrainian Carpathians during the late Soviet period, with a particular focus on materiality, landscape, and the entanglements between community, craft, and place. She is a member of the editorial board of Commons, Journal for Social Criticism.