Museo de Mujeres

Rosario Castellanos’ poetry touches me deeply, beyond the temporal distance. I admire her force to affirm herself in this world, with all its implications, at a time even more hostile to women than today. She illuminates and motivates me.

This is a multiple piece that can be read as loose pages in a book. It’s composed by ten embroideries in which I reproduce some verses from her poem “Joyful mysteries” (“Misterios gozozos”), one of my favorites. I chose the verses thinking about how they represented me or how I identified myself with them. The process was long, I read and reread each poem, I felt each verse and extracted it to re- contextualize it. I did many sketches, chose the fabrics and threads according to each verse, I re-did each composition many times, and finished by placing them on different fabrics. It is embroidered by hand with little machine sewing. Making it tactile, with more texture and volume, by placing batting between the layers, was one of my objectives. It took me almost four years to finish it: each verse, each page dictated its own times and wants, and I simply obeyed them.

Embroidering words, poems, allows me to feel and communicate them in a different way, stitch by stitch, while time flows at its own rhythm and I, “only as in a journey, like in dreams,” (“sólo como de viaje, como en sueños”) remain absorbed in this action.