In artist and writer Savia Viegas’ new exhibition Goa’s Lovetales, faded blue denim becomes an archive of subversive memories. Worn jeans are cut apart, patiently stitched, embroidered and reimagined as luminous quilts that cradle villages and rivers, churches and ancestral homes, and above all, the intimate stories that time leaves behind.
What begins as recycled fabric gradually reveals itself as a map of lives lived quietly – of women’s desires and compromises, forbidden love, migration and loss, religion and family honour, and the fragile textures of a disappearing world. The exhibition’s greatest surprise is that it is not really about textiles. It is about storytelling. Each embroidered work is accompanied by a brief narrative, and the relationship between image and text is central to the experience. The quilts do not merely illustrate stories; they deepen them. Threads become sentences, motifs become memory and fabric becomes witness.
The origin of the exhibition lies in an intensely personal discovery. During the pandemic, Viegas was clearing her late mother’s cupboards when she came across a quilt made from her sons’ outgrown jeans. As she unpicked and resized it, she realised that the fabric carried traces of family history. A childhood skill, once dismissed as domestic craft, suddenly revealed itself as a serious artistic language.
That moment led first to Carmona’s Talking Quilt and eventually to Goa’s Lovetales, a body of work that transforms intimate memory into a collective cultural archive. “The archive is really in my head,” Viegas says, adding, “My writings, paintings and quilted tapestries are merely a disgorging of that archive into public space.”
Born in Goa when it was still under Portuguese rule, Viegas grew up in a household dominated by women. Her mother was a tailoring and embroidery teacher, and the home was filled with coloured threads and endless conversations. More important than the craft itself was the atmosphere of oral storytelling. “We would sleep on the floor and delve into the night with stories and laughter by lamplight,” she recalls.
Many of the stories in Goa’s Lovetales are drawn from real incidents, village gossip, family histories and the moral ambiguities of everyday life. They are rooted in Goa, yet resonate far beyond it. The exhibition’s title may suggest romance, but these are not sentimental love stories. Love appears here as longing, betrayal, endurance, social transgression and survival. The narratives move across migration, dowry, motherhood, ageing, sexuality and religious identity. Beauty is constantly shadowed by unease.
One of the exhibition’s most striking departures is its inclusion of queer love. In works such as Just a Normal Girl!, Viegas explores adolescent same-sex desire with remarkable tenderness, allowing queer longing to occupy the same emotional landscape as more conventional love stories.
Rather than treating it as an exception, she folds it into the larger fabric of Goan life, suggesting that desire, secrecy, shame and affection have always existed within these communities, even when they remained unspoken.
This tension between visual richness and emotional complexity is one of the exhibition’s strengths. Viegas is acutely aware of embroidery’s history as women’s domestic work, often excluded from the category of art. She deliberately reclaims the medium as a vehicle for political and historical memory. She cites the Chilean arpilleras – embroidered textiles that documented disappearances under the Pinochet dictatorship – as an example of how needlework can encode resistance.
The choice of denim is equally significant. Durable, democratic and globally recognisable, denim carries its own cultural history. By embroidering intimate stories onto discarded denim, Viegas performs an act of repair – not only of fabric, but of memory itself.
What makes Goa’s Lovetales particularly compelling is that it avoids nostalgia. Viegas does not romanticise the past; she examines it. Old homes, village landscapes and inherited customs are preserved not because they were perfect, but because they reveal how power, love and memory shape ordinary lives.
In an age of disposable clothing and shrinking attention spans, her quilts ask us to slow down and read fabric as we would literature. Every patch carries a history, every thread a voice. The result is an exhibition that sits at the intersection of art, literature, feminism and ecology – a reminder that some of the most enduring archives are not written in books, but stitched patiently into cloth.