Lo Que Queremos (What We Want)

Abstract

In a reality where gendered violence institutes the ways of living for women in Latin-America, walking into a fictional, unknotted dimension seems compulsory. We are forced to live in perpetual fear. We are victims of the violence encouraged by contemporary patriarchal culture. LO QUE QUEREMOS (WHAT WE WANT) portrays our desperate desire for peace in contrast to our reality of a world filled with femicides and corruption. The Mexican rebozo (a traditional, colorful shawl) is abstracted and repurposed to provide a phenomenological, visual getaway from the atrocities happening to women in Mexico. Paintings and sculptures displaying distorted images of my native city, Ciudad Juárez, are fashioned with this garment of power. With these images, I examine an idyllic landscape where safety is a right, but also condemn the injustices of gendered violence. I express sentiments of confinement, based from personal memories, which have been revisited through present universal quarantine conditions. Through the knotting, I attempt to evoke an experience of entrapment and imaginary but much desired liberation. I physically create knots to question physical spaces and its permutations. I sculpt, paint, and draw knots to alter the reality of surfaces and suggest contradictory but complimentary feelings of liberation and tension. The knotted rebozo is a framed escape to the violence-less life I always dreamed of living, but also protests against all injustices preventing our peace.