Distaff: Contemporary Embroidery in the Former Yugoslav Countries brings together contemporary artistic practices that use embroidery as a powerful medium of expression. The book maps, gathers, and presents artists, collectives, and projects from across the former Yugoslav region, highlighting the diversity of themes, formats, aesthetics, and messages carried through embroidery. Moving beyond the idea of embroidery as a traditional craft or decorative technique, the book explores it as a contemporary artistic tool connected to memory, labour, care, resistance, feminism, and social change. It presents embroidery as a medium that can speak about personal and collective histories, gender-based violence, migration, everyday life, political struggles, and forms of community.

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Written in both “our” language and English, the book aims to make contemporary embroidery more visible and accessible to a wider audience, while opening space for further research, dialogue, and connection among artists from the former Yugoslav countries.