Aluna/Embroider Peace
Embroidering Peace – The Breath of Aluna
A project carried out with Alfred Nobel High School in Clichy-sous-Bois, at the invitation of their teacher Olympe Routis, as part of the PREAC program.
Born from a deep desire for reconnection, Embroidering Peace is a collective, meditative, and committed artwork. Inspired by the philosophy of the Kogis an Indigenous people of Colombia who believe that “to live is to weave, and to weave is to think, to connect with Aluna, the breath of life”—the project transforms embroidery into a gesture of connection, care, and repair. Through this slow, ancestral practice, the students weave invisible yet powerful ties: with each other, with the fabric, with the world.
Seated in a circle around a large sheet of rice paper stained with ink—evoking gauze, that light fabric once produced in Gaza, a historic textile hub—the students symbolically seek to mend the wounds of the world. Before stitching, they allowed ink to flow freely across the surface of the paper, creating spontaneous color stains, both intimate and expressive.
Each stitch, each thread, thus becomes an act of care, poetic resistance, and commitment. The choice of the song Holm, performed in Arabic by two students, imbues the performance with a universal message of hope and resilience. Woven into the background is a discreet tribute—to Gaza, to its pain, to its memory.
The public presentation of the project took place on May 17th in the Khorsabad Courtyard of the Louvre Museum. A place steeped in over 3,000 years of history, witness to vanished civilizations, became the living setting for this vibrant and meditative performance. There, at the foot of colossal Assyrian figures, the students sat cross-legged on the ground to embroider together. In this contrast between ancient memory and contemporary creation, gesture becomes language. It is no longer just the final piece that matters, but the collective breath, the attention to one another, the shared slowness. A peace not imposed, but alive—built through diversity.
Throughout the 110 meters of golden thread patiently embroidered, a true human cartography unfolds. A way to "make a world" together, to embrace a different temporality—one that reconnects us with our inner rhythms, with silence, and with our own wounds. Through each hand that dances across the fabric, each person’s breath mingles with the breath of others, and the threads become ties, memory, and hope.