women sustain the pandemic

Women sustain the pandemic
Digital Photography
11x9'
2021

Under visual sovereignty, we can also generate images of what it means to represent other bodies, giving them humanity through objects, to construct them more imaginatively from our own cultural, everyday and domestic cosmogony.

I allow myself to use the visual as a way of explaining a non-verbalized fact. We women carry the burden of the pandemic on our shoulders through domestic labor, an unpaid labor that expands to become an exhausting and perpetual duty during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both mothers and non-mothers nurture and care for our families in the kitchen, a space traditionally associated with the feminine.

The subject-object relationship goes beyond functional use, utensils are cared for and protected from a maternal position, as an extension of our own essence, with which we nourish ourselves, being an integral part of the family.

I highlight this episode of daily life through a technique similar to the one I use when intervening photographs with embroidery. I decontextualize the image, wrapping it in threads and adding surreal elements that highlight, in this case, the meaning of the food, who prepares it and the interactions that are woven around it. Women sustain the pandemic, for where there is no food, there is no life.

From this creative process called "Women sustain the pandemic, 2021", come the photographs of self-portraits and the series of textile and fibre sculptures "Where there is no food, there is no life" made during the residency at BICAPLATAFORMA OCCUPATION WR 3, Brazil.

‿︵‿︵ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ・❉・ ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ‿︵‿︵

See BICA PLATAFORMA OCUPAÇÃO WR#3

Women sustain the pandemic > hijadelacoca

As mothers, daughters, and sisters, mothers shoulder the responsibility of taking care of family members and working in domestic spaces in the home, kitchen, and other places associated with motherhood and maternity. Hija reveals the social divide between how women are portrayed as individuals whose places are merely within the confines of the home, their marriage, and motherhood, and their roles as domestic free labours. The subject-object relationship in Hija’s textile works goes beyond the utility function of the objects themselves, acting as an extension of women’s maternal position in society–to protect, feed, and care for the entire family. (Han, 2022).