Manifesto — Crow Stitch Collective

Our Manifesto 🗒

Crows exist between lines: good and bad, feared and admired. They’ve been seen as omens of death, decay, and darkness. But they’ve also represented wisdom, memory, and survival. As creatures of contradiction, crows navigate the in-between: between the underworld and the sky, wilderness and invasive urban life, tradition and transformation.

In Lebanon, it’s not crows we speak of - not often. We speak of blackbirds as omens, of birds in cages, of birds migrating. Of leaving, of return, of the ones who never return. Maybe the absence of crows is itself a kind of presence.

- Yara

Through myth, folklore, and symbol, the chiaroscuro of the crow has remained versatile, ever-changing, yet always watching. They are messengers, scavengers, survivors. They witness and carry the multitude of our psyche, holding what we project onto them: the ugliness within us, our striving for knowledge, our curiosity, our resilience and our fight to build and keep our delicate nest.

We live in a time of monsters: ecological collapse, social fragmentation and political distrust. The future feels unstable, but as we move, we wonder:

What if uncertainty is a place to inhabit?

To move with contradiction rather than flatten it. The underworld, the unseen, the uncomfortable, the misunderstood, is where new ideas, relationships, and possibilities can take shape. We believe change grows from these thresholds.

Like crows, we move through different grounds: urban and wild, personal and political, physical and spiritual. It’s with the sharp, needle-like claws that we begin stitching the delicate fabric of our current present and our shared future. It’s an invisible language of repair and resistance, passed down through generations.

Although our hands are linked to ancestral gestures,
holding the needle today means committing to the emergence of something together.

– Alessia

Stitching is a form of survival, like the calls crows use to communicate, or living in a community to endure. It keeps things together. It pays attention. It is a slow and present act, passed down by our foremothers to create, mend and repair what has been torn. To hold on to what matters.

Crow Stitch is our collective response to dark times. Crow the intention and the stitch, the creativity. It emerges from a shared need to build a nest for resistance, care, and for becoming otherwise.

The crow doesn’t need to be liked. It doesn’t seek approval. It survives—together. That, too, is our practice. A way of making, thinking, and being together. It is a pattern in the making—not fixed, but always becoming 👩

قصه ما به سر رسید کلاغه به خونش نرسید

[Our story has come to its end, but the crow has not reached its nest]

We inhabit the uncertainty of the world as our making practice, like the crow in the story, it is perhaps not the destination we should focus on or the convenience of the reader, but the story, the process, and the time we spend together.
- Yegane

There could be a crow watching you now