The Home as a Place of Power — from Avalon to Florianopolis

Abstract

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon Mists (1979) is the story of King Arthur, told from the perspective of women when the Goddess was revered. In the home environment, they spin, weave, embroider, sew and resist, while devising strategies to survive and make life, guarding power and magic. The filmic and poetic images that bring these spaces of intimacy from the house, where women are apparently overwhelmed while men fight, are identified and joined by a red thread. This thread is brought to Florianópolis, the Island of Magic, in Brazil, by embroidery that will be used as a process of vernacular origin in artistic production. Embroidery: a feminine task that sometimes seems like punishment and domestication, but also promotes concentration. House: place of deprivation and enclosure, but also of power and nutrition. The goal is to remember the house as a place of power, because as Bachelard (1993, 29) says, “… the passions cook and rejoice in solitude. It is enclosed in its loneliness that the being of passion prepares its outbursts or its deeds. I interweave the relations between space, memory and poetic image to investigate under what conditions the house can be a place of power in a country where the “beautiful, modest and homey” woman is revered at a time of feminist effervescence. How to weave with these threads, architect outlets and openings, sew possibilities and plot in these difficult times ahead? Through the reactivation of memory we seek possible perspectives of coping and existence.