Stitching Against the Archive: Embroidery as Counter Cartography

Architectural and historical archives have often perpetuated incomplete narratives by omitting voices based by gender, sexuality, and race. In nineteenth-century India, colonial historiography and institutionalized archives reinforced this exclusion, sidelining vernacular storytelling traditions such as folksongs, literature, and embroidery. This talk proposes an alternative queer historiography that turns to regional embroidery in Gujarat—particularly Kathiawari and Kutchi practices—as a counter-archive through which marginalized histories of sexuality can be both traced and reimagined. This talk situates embroidery within broader debates on representation, materiality, and historical loss. It aims to highlight how embroidered textiles—through their tactile, sensory, and spatial qualities—open up other ways of witnessing and remembering queer lives. Methodologically, this work advances embroidery as architectural historiography. Through the creation of a hand-embroidered tablecloth that records everyday queer spatial experiences from my childhood, I weave personal narrative into a longer lineage of communal memory embedded in domestic textile practices. This act of making demonstrates how embroidery exceeds decorative function: it operates as an embodied and critical practice, carrying counter-hegemonic knowledge and resisting the silences of the colonial archive. By juxtaposing archival manipulation with the creative agency of regional artisans and my own practice, I wish to explore embroidery’s generative role as a counter-archive. For architectural history, this offers a new framework for engaging with marginalized sexualities and genders as deeply inscribed in material, spatial, and sensory practices.