Developing the disappearing art of Lefkaritika into a community pedagogy, in order to witness the silences in marginalised women's lives.

“Lefkaritika”是一种独特的蕾丝制作风格，是塞浦路斯农村独有的，莱昂纳多·达·芬奇非常欣赏，1491年访问米兰大教堂后，他为米兰大教堂的祭坛布买了一块，这启发了他的画“最后的晚餐”中的桌布（Özyigit, 2020, p.47）。2009年，联合国认识到这种工艺的国际意义和对其生存的直接威胁，将其列入“人类非物质文化遗产代表名录”（联合国教科文组织，2009年）。Lefkaritika被定义为“社会和艺术实践”，现在“承受着如此大的压力，它可能会消失”，因为知识主要存在于少数幸存的蕾丝匠老化的手和记忆中（Kokko, Kaipainen， 2015年第10页）。2014年，仅在Lefkara村就有大约250名妇女工作，这条蕾丝就是在这个村庄命名的（联合国教科文组织，2014年），我父亲的家人也住在这里。今天，岛上只有40个（采访玛格丽塔，castleline, 2020）。在我的创意写作硕士学位期间，尽管疫情肆虐，我还是在Lefkara （Grampus Heritage Training Ltd）完成了两次伊拉斯谟资助的驻留项目。采用人种学方法（Pink, 2013），并在我作为社区艺术从业者的职业生涯的支持下，我开始探索创伤妇女证词中沉默的跨学科表现，特别是沉默作为保护机制的情况（Nórby,2005）。通过对村民的定性访谈和对档案材料的视觉分析，揭示了蕾丝制作者生活及其周围的多层次沉默。就像Lefkaritika的一个典型特征——故意制造洞一样，这些沉默往往是故意的；有意嵌入故事结构的空隙。基于新兴的女权主义理论，将沉默定位为一种刻意未说的修辞（Glenn, 2004），我打算发展一种教学法，见证弱势女性生活中的沉默，包括如何听到、分享和最终鼓励声音。

'Lefkaritika', a style of lacemaking unique to rural Cyprus, was so admired by Leonardo Da Vinci that following a visit in 1491, he bought a piece for the altar cloth of the Milan Cathedral, which inspired the tablecloth in his painting The Last Supper (Özyigit, 2020, p.47). In 2009, recognising both the craft's international significance and the immediate threat to its survival, the United Nations inscribed it onto the 'Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity' (UNESCO, 2009). Defined as a 'social and artistic practice', Lefkaritika is now 'under such stress that it may disappear' because knowledge primarily lies in the ageing hands and memories of the few remaining lacemakers (Kokko, Kaipainen, 2015 p.10). In2014, approximately 250 women worked in Lefkara alone, the village which gives the lace its name(UNESCO, 2014) and where my paternal family lived. Today there are barely 40 scattered across the island(Interview with Margarita, Castledine, 2020).During my Creative Writing MA, despite the pandemic, I completed two Erasmus funded residencies in Lefkara (Grampus Heritage Training Ltd). Adopting an ethnographic approach (Pink, 2013) and supported by my career as a community arts practitioner, I began to explore interdisciplinary representations of silence in traumatised women's testimony, especially where silence acts as a protective mechanism (Nórby,2005). Through qualitative interviews with villagers and visual analysis of archive material, multi-layered silences in and around the lacemakers' lives were revealed. Just like the deliberate creation of holes, a defining feature of Lefkaritika, these silences are often intentional; conscious gaps embedded into the fabric of a story. Building on emerging feminist theory, which positions silence as a rhetoric of the deliberately unspoken (Glenn, 2004), I intend to develop a pedagogy that witnesses silences in vulnerable women's lives, including how gaps may be heard, shared and ultimately encourage voice.