RESCUING QUALITY

Redendê, Boa Noite, Bilro, Filé, Labirinto. Do you know these words? They came from Portugal, from Spain, from Holland, from Ireland. The words were transformed with time, but not the tradition which they describe.

Maria Helena Estrada
The region of the São Francisco River, on the stretch which divides the States of Alagoas and Sergipe, near to the Paulo Afonso hydroelectric power station, has an inviting name – Xingó. The lazy river winds through this region planting hamlets on one and other bank. But it is on the Alagoas side that the embroidery needle workers and lace makers can be found, preserving intact a tradition which arrived with the colonizers, or rather, with the nun's schools in which the well-bred girls were taught domestic arts – amongst which was embroidery.
This, according to Lia Mônica Rossi, a designer and production engineer who has dedicated her time to researching the tradition of embroidery in Brazil, is the origin of the needle worker and lace making communities in Brazil’s North and Northeast, which is not as old as one might think. “The communities involved in embroidery and lace are not over a half century old”, the designer claims, although one really doesn't know with any certainty when the riverside communities and those on the coast of the Northeast region began this practice more continuously.
“Our lace came from Portugal, which in turn received it from Flanders, from France and Italy, well-known centers since the mid and end of the XV century (...). We can see, in prints of Dutch Brazil, the taste for lace in both male and female attire”, the anthropologist Antônio da Câmara Cascudo wrote in his book “Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro”.
Visiting two tiny hamlets in Alagoas, in Entremontes and on the Ilha do Ferro island, seeing how the needle workers live, isolated in their communities, with the craft passing from generation to generation, one can observe the richness resulting from living suspended in time.
Seated at the door of the houses – until a little while ago –, passing down from mother to daughter, they learn and embroider the same stitch, making tablecloths, towels, linen or Panama sheets or doing cushion embroidering, which is the name given to bobbin lace. Until a short while ago, also, an outsider could take the results of days and weeks of work for next to nothing.
Today this reality has changed. As in every corner of Brazil, the Solidarity Community (Comunidade Solidária) (frequently in a partnership with Sebrae) and Sebrae itself have rescued our antique crafts, toys from the hinterland of the State of Paraiba, the sculptors of saints in Ibimirim (PE), and ceramics from Rio Real (BA), among others.
Why, in a design magazine, talk about “Brazilian embroideries”?
Really, this embroidery can have a double function, or meaning: the character of embroidery on the North and Northeastern coast provides a livelihood for the underprivileged populations and, at the same time, results of this work opens a further Brazilian means of access to exports.
In Entremontes, a tiny village in which around 200 families live, the Solidarity Community three years ago developed a project coordinated by Verônica Paiva, which included the purchase of a house, a visit by a specialist in organizing cooperative enterprises and also assistance from a designer, Lia Mônica Rossi, who systematized production by assisting in organizing the models, the embroideries and the products.
The embroidery stitches reflect, in an ingenuous and poetic way, the local reality: pigeon eye, rice grain, bull's forehead, star, little cookie, spider’s nest, single rose, five rose spray, star. In small details, the colorful and delicate presence of cross stitch, the most popular embroidery stitch in all Brazil.
“Where there’s a fish net, there’s lace”, goes the popular saying. While the husbands fish, the women embroider, adding to the family income without wounding the tradition, without leaving the house.
But today the embroiders leave home to work, in spite of the initial vehement protests from the husbands. The Entremontes Embroidery House (Casa do Bordado de Entremontes) is the center where they produce and market their work. Sixty women, in the community of a little more than 500 inhabitants, who sell to the Northeast, to elegant shops in Sao Paulo (to Bianco su Bianco, for example, on the Al. Gabriel Monteiro da Silva), to Germany and to Italy. The 600 American placemats for the Rubayat restaurants, in São Paulo, were produced by 60 embroiders at the House in less than a month.
Entremontes has always lived from embroidery and from sewing. Located in the badlands, the women sewed for the outlaw Lampião, the vain “goat”.
But how did this work, which was threatened with extinction, become valued again? “Everything began with a visit of the president of Sebrae, Sérgio Moreira, who is from the state of Alagoas”, one of the embroiderers recalls. Today, they only make use of external collaboration at the time they order fabric and yarn, which comes from São Paulo, but is paid for by the community.
In this region, bobbin lace is disappearing. A tradition from the Açores islands, in Entremontes there are only two ladies, both elderly, who can use the bobbins (wooden spools attached to the nuts of the aricuri palm), two in each hand, and on a cushion the perforated paper designs are drawn, pieces of cardboard with tiny holes which determine the direction of the lace and is attached to the fabric by pins made of mandacaru cactus spines. These old pieces of paper are treasured by each family of lace makers.
“Lace is not only to do with women, but always with women in love, uffering for love”, as we read in “Nísia Floresta: The Art of Lace Making”, a precious work published by the Edison Carneiro Museum of Folklore, in Rio de Janeiro, referring to lace in Rio Grande do Norte.
Perhaps there are no more women passionately in love, or suffering, but the fact is that the lace makers are disappearing, as seen in the area of the Lagoa da Conceição, in Florianópolis, and only in Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte and some places in Alagoas is it still possible to find bobbin lace.
Near to Entremontes, 15 minutes in a little motor boat, is the Ilha do Ferro island, which is not really an island, but a rocky formation in the middle of the waters of the São Francisco River, which gives its name to the village.
On the Ilha do Ferro, the embroidery is the Good Night (Boa Noite) – a flower which is typical in the region –, a variation of the embroidery stitch created there. And the theme embroidered is always the same yellow flower.
Also on the Ilha do Ferro we find a community's similar to that in Entremontes, with 40 embroiderers who barely raise their eyes from their embroidery frames when a visitor arrives. They have to prepare orders of sheets for Germany, starch a banquet tablecloth that was embroidered by four sets of hands over two months. Work like this costs 90 reais the square meter.
On the Ilha do Ferro there are still some famous personalities, such as Fernando and Aberaldo, who work with what they find in nature, and Nan, who makes guitars and violins. In Fernando’s home workshop we discover the universe of dreams, imaginary creatures, made from branches and the remains of trees found by chance, from which he, without great elaboration, brings forth a head of a dog with a caiman’s tail, or animals which one look will require you to ask “what is that animal”.
But one cannot talk about these communities on the banks of the São Francisco without bringing Piranhas into the conversation. A cantonment founded in the XVIII century, today it is a town with a vocation for tourism, spotlessly clean (as is everything, all through the region), preserved, poetic, having only eight roads, with the old railroad station transformed into the Sertão Museum, which has pieces from the outlaw bands (cangaceiros), and the D. Pedro II Palace , where the emperor slept. Piranhas has beaches and has a canyon, it has freshwater shrimp, there is a hostel, and from there the boats leave for passage to Entremontes or the Ilha do Ferro island.
Returning to Maceió, we found a handicraft center, the “Pontal”, which is dedicated to making filet lace, constructed on large square frames, which, in wide stitches, make a colorful variety of skirts and fabrics appear. The embroiderers’ houses, one behind the other, little shops, which sell the “coqueiro” chair and rattan furniture, objects, made from coconut shells and embroidered towels, colorful, in fabrics made from coconut fiber. Some things still give a suggestion of old-fashioned kitsch; such as the roses embroidered on coconut fiber fabric, others, more notably those that had been subject to scrutiny by a designer, are ready to compete with the best handicraft anywhere in the world. An antique art, of European origin, the centuries old work of lace makers and embroiderers, preserved by a hands which till the soil itself, and which the industrial world is now seeking out.

ARC DESIGN visited the Pontal handicraft center, in Maceió, the town of Entremontes and the Ilha do Ferro island, both in Alagoas, with support from Sebrae Alagoas and the Handicraft’s Program of the Solidarity Community Council (Programa Artesanato do Conselho da Comunidade Solidária).


BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro. Luis da Câmara Cascudo. Edit. Itatiaia, Belo Horizonte. 5a edição, 1984
- Nísia Floresta: A Arte do Rendar. Márcia Silveira Gama e Maria Helena Torres. Rio de Janeiro, Funarte, 2001
- Vivendo o São Francisco: Bordados de Entremontes. Pesquisa e texto de Verônica Paiva e Raul Lody. Funarte, Rio de Janeiro, 2001
- Entremontes: um olhar sobre o patrimônio, o artesanato, a escola. Programa Artesanato Solidário, Conselho da Comunidade Solidária.
2001
- O Barro e a Renda. Caroline Harari, Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, São Paulo, 2002