Entre flores y medusas. Un relato entretejido

Abstract

This article takes as its point of departure my artistic work "Entre flores y medusas" (2010), which is itself part of the series Desplazamientos, developed between 2010 and 2011. The work consists of twenty-four silk scarves bearing printed photographic portraits that have been intervened with embroidered flora and fauna. It employs sewing as a strategy of material and conceptual displacement to highlight how cultural conventions encode gender roles and inscribe them onto bodies, reducing female identity to the dichotomous categories of the beautiful or the monstrous. In this work, embroidery and the transfer of photography onto the scarf object function as strategies of material and symbolic displacement, understood as acts of transfer that make it possible to dismantle pre-existing uses, meanings, and conventions. Drawing on this work and on subsequent artistic practices, the article proposes a double, interconnected reflection: first, on the relationship between image, body, ornament, and domesticity; and second, on the need for an interwoven narrative capable of accounting for the set of material, experiential, and intellectual circumstances that make the work possible. In this way, the artistic trajectory is conceived analogously to weaving: a processual fabric of experimentation, reflection, and synthesis that is activated, deactivated, and sedimented over time.