PRIMEIRA PARAGEM

To enter Primeira Paragem is to enter a lingering sense of time, one that suspends the speed of the gaze and draws us closer to what the hands know before words. Susana Cereja begins with the Arraiolos stitch, an ancestral technique rooted in Portuguese memory, to displace textile-making from its traditional place and reinscribe it within contemporary creation. This gesture matters, as it challenges the hierarchy that has historically associated embroidery, sewing and weaving with the feminine, the domestic and the invisible. Here, the stitch asserts itself as language, body and artistic position. The exhibition extends Casa de Partida (Arraiolos, 2025). If that exhibition evoked origin, belonging and an affective matrix, Primeira Paragem marks the moment when those threads begin to move. Mirandela becomes a place of listening and transformation, calling forth its landscapes, legends and shared memories. Earlier works intersect with new creations, revealing the recurring axes of the artist’s practice: femininity, territory, mythology, community and reinvention. Through archetypal figures, gestures of care and references to nature, the tapestries challenge the technical and conceptual boundaries of traditional making, while the Arraiolos stitch operates as a field for visual, narrative and symbolic experimentation. In the new works, this universe enters into a more direct relationship with this territory, evoking the memory of the landscape, stone, water, earth, night, legends and images of resistance that run through the local imagination. The female figure emerges as a central presence: a sensitive, wounded, insurgent body, connected to the earth and to its forces of transformation. Each stitch entails time. Each embroidered surface holds decisions and new beginnings. The work emerges from a body that lingers over matter and compels us to stop, to bring our gaze closer to the gesture. Primeira Paragem is an exhibition about movement, even when it speaks of pause. It invokes textile as a meeting point between history, body, landscape and community. Because weaving is a way of knowing. And remembering is the first gesture of transformation. This is the first of the stops. A necessary pause, not to interrupt the journey, but to open it to what remains, to what transforms, and to what is yet to come. Cláudia Melo Curator