Embroideries
The project “Bordados y Desbordados” (Embroidered and Overboard) is part of a series of works done on forcibly displaced women who have immigrated to the city. The idea is to embroider fine fabrics, cloths and silks from “exclusive” designers with popular, working-class motifs that are part of the collective memory of embroidery.
The embroidered dress is a very popular part of working-class rural Colombia, an outfit for Sundays, for baptisms. It is embroidered, repeatedly, it overflows, it is imperfect, completely opposite the brand name fabrics that are perfect front and back.
The artist learned to embroider as a child with her grandmother, who taught her, like a nun, to embroider perfectly on both sides, inside and out. These embroideries are now about leaving visible imperfections, tangles and mistakes that are part of embroidery and life. It is about highlighting the contrasts between the popular and the exclusive and the luxurious, between the perfect and the imperfect, between fiction and reality.
This work attempts to justify the values of traditional, intimate feminine labor as a way to heal absences and forced displacement. It is a way to fight against forgetting and loneliness, recovering traditions and ancestral ceremonies as a way to rethink the present.
