Velhices e envelhecimento: potências do cuidado tecido nas dobras e redobras do bordado

Abstract

This study seeks, upon drawing a life line between science, philosophy and art, a way for the other to exist, or a way for one who does not follow a preestablished model to, rather, create her own behaviour. It arised out of questions centering on the contemporary manner of care for life where technical education prevails and puts an emphasis on disciplines, specialities and Technologies, resulting in a practice of medicine that controls and demands the auto control of the body, centered on prescriptive care since what is of most importance is to proceed in an integrated and orderly fashion in multi-professional terms about the desired processes attached to the production of existing copying mechanisms, and guided by an eye on the risk of getting sick and dying. In this sense, addressing care of the aging is addressing care for the biological body’s health. The study was made possible by the work done in conjunction with Teia de Aranha (Spider’s Web), a multi-aged women’s embroidery group, and was designed to demonstrate that the failure to recognize reality opens a pathway to that which is real, to an encounter with the unpredictable, and to life’s possibilities. Based on the interaction with these embroiderers, we show the exercise of that which we seek to form: the production of care which is carried out in simple and necessary day-to-day life which can release and energize life. In this perspective aspects and moments of this group are addressed where the recognition and reception of uncertainties, coincidences, and the desire to continue on life’s daily paths results in an affirmative ethic in the production of good and happy meetings which increase sensibilities, places, and times. We weave a web for thought on the care for life starting with the clues we judged to have potential and which arose in the embroidery meetings or in the group’s parties. With this focus, we addressed reading and embroidering as possibilities for escape from the normalization of modes of existence among the aging. Literature, poetry and embroidery while places of care inserted into a space-time populated with intensities. We show that the body — maker of these embroidered works — which grows old among friends is in the constant process of contamination and transformation and that focus on the exchanges, the efforts to act and to think will implicate a form of care in and of itself