Gomito a Gomito: Agnes Schwienbacker
By Ady Salvatierra
On March 13, 2024 the Mosaic group met Agnes Schwienbacker, a former detainee and trainee at Gomito a Gomito. Her book Rinchiusa details the experiences of herself and her fellow detainees in Italian prison. She explained to the mosaic group that healthy hobbies such as sewing and gardening helped her transform her life to be healthy and fulfilling.
Agnes Schwienbacker during the Mosaic interview at the Dickinson Center in Bologna (picture above).
Gomito a Gomito, the social cooperative Schwienbacker worked for, is an organization that gives women facing incarceration or formerly incarcerated women a job and training needed to become skilled seamstress. Gomito a Gomito, which we had visited earlier in the day, uses only donated materials from the fashion industry, an environmental decision made to reduce the waste in the textile industries. They also provide their seamstresses labor contracts to protect their rights as workers. Both of these procedures are used to ensure their values of both human and environmental sustainability. Gomito a Gomito inspired Schwienbacker to create a different life for herself as she went through her detainment process. In talking about her time at Gomito a Gomito, Schwienbacker stated, “Making beautiful things helped me to imagine a different world”.
Schwienbacker explained that today she keeps busy and inspired as a writer, beekeeper, and farmer. She farms vegetables in the spring and summer, and sews slippers in the winter. Ever since Agnes was little she worked very hard with her family. She was always put to work and found comfort in her productivity. Going to prison was hard because not only was she recovering from drug addiction and missing her family, but she was also extremely bored and discontent with the fact that she could not work. As we learned, prisons are notoriously overcrowded, resulting in serious mental health issues for the detainees. For Schwienbacker, access to a prison job helped give her a purpose and ability to move forward. Through Schwienbacker’s inspiring story the mosaic group was able to see the restorative opportunities that Gomito a Gomito is creating for formerly incarcerated women.
In the picture on the left, the cover of Agnes Schwienbacker’s book Rinchiusa