Skin and the body
are very important
ways of embodying
the idea humanity
We experience the world
through our body
and the body changes
through that experience
So when I make a scar
that's a way of presenting something
but it's
at the same time a way of representing
ideas of suffering sorrow
recovery
healing
these cycles
I began working with scars and skin
when I was still painting
back in the late eighties
I began working with images of scars
and then
I stopped painting and
I began working with textiles
because I really needed to do
something that was very different for me
Something that could give me
some surprises
that I didn't know how to handle that
I didn't know
what was going to come out of it
So I began working with
second hand garments
I feel Nicaragua gives me the good
and the bad things
for the things that I make
It gives me the
confidence you know
joy and a sense of humor and
togetherness and solidarity and empathy
as if things that I find here
that is like the
slate where I can't do anything else
It’s like I love to hate Managua
See what I mean?
It's a really difficult society
It's aggressive it's violent
It's violent against women
in general but specifically
against women
Also it can be very painful
because of social processes
natural disasters
the way in life
the dynamics of social relationships happen
It's all very difficult
and very charming on the other hand
all of those components are
in the work that I make
because that's my life
In the early nineties
we really wanted to do something
we didn't know what exactly
we were maybe interested
in public art
maybe interested
in installation art
We didn't quite pinpoint
what was the most important thing
But we wanted to do things
The idea of feminine materiality
Well in my case
I can see
most of the fabric and clothing
that I use
that I choose to bring to my workshop
is soft
and that is not related to
the idea of
women being soft
which sounds more like
women being weak
But it's related to the clothing
that my mother wore
and my aunt wore
and it's probably all based in the same
reference
why are women
dressed with this clothing?
Where does that come from?
In that sense I'm not trying to
criticize or question certain stereotypes
I'm just assuming that this is
a type of materiality
that I am interested in
and I use it as such to speak about
motherhood to speak about
bearing children
Motherhood revealed itself
as an extremely difficult
task and it was really
hard to protect him
without being overprotective
A lot of my pieces or some of my pieces
are related to that overprotection
some of my pieces are related to the
fear and anxiety
that I felt with this responsibility
In the early
nineties
The Nicaraguan Biennale came
I entered a piece that was
not exactly a painting
It was a
painted dress
with other objects hanging from it
I wasn't just making
formal experimentation
I really was making a work that
was significant for me
That wasn't understood
or appreciated or respected
by my fellow artists
And then it so happened that
I got the great prize
There was a huge sort of revolt
against me against the work
against the jury against the contest
against everything
This was really good actually
because it made the whole system shift
the biennial changed, instead of
being the painting biennial
it became the Visual Art Biennial
And then it sort of drew
like a magnet it drew
all sorts of different
artists and intentions
So there was a really clear moment
of a big change
big transformation in Nicaragua
I use mostly found
objects because of the associations
that you can find in them
To their previous history
I don't know a knife
has a history in the sense that knives
have associations of what they are used for
but as well I use
objects that have some
indexes of decay And decay
many times is expressed through
broken pieces and the way
that has been put back together
I was working with a little skeleton
of an opossum that I found
and one of the bones was broken
and it had healed
It was broken then it was put together
or got together back like that
And you could see the sort of bone cement
that had formed
And that is just beautiful
because it's life healing itself
This guy was given to me by a friend
and it's also a opossum that
got run over in the highway and
it has been with me for years
So he's more like a
Asian type of puppet with the two sticks
so there is something really
I don't know
It's almost funny
But at the same time it looks really
when I see this face
with these teeth approaching this face
this other face it terrifies me
I can feel just like
shivers
Fragility is one of the of the
axis of my work
Vulnerability
very much related to
wounds, to sorrow
at the same time related to resilience
This is like all these things
are just different
components or aspects of
what I see as one single complex thing
which is relationships and dynamics
Fragiles was the name of one
of my exhibitions
and another was Balance and Collapse
And it's all
about the same issues about being stable
or the fiction of being stable
the fiction of stability
being too vulnerable to withstand
any kind of crisis
This specifically it belonged to a child
I think
so it's got its own type of sadness
And maybe I can put this together with that
I don't know
And they will not be speaking about
specifically the cultural implications of Barbie
nor the cultural implications of
slaughterhouse for example
It's not like I'm going to tell a story related
to what I see
I want to tell the story
that is based on these type of materials
to speak on their own
to speak by themselves
But I really enjoy using found objects
as a language because of the all the meaning
they already bring with them
Many times I am bringing one thing
and putting it against another
to see what it tells me
So I am the first public to that work
and if it moves me
if it makes me smile
then I think it will move other people
I feel that if I make the more personal
I make it the more I will be able to
communicate with others
So it's definitely intimate
and it's definitely
self-referential
women are taught to be
comfortable with their role
However when you have a condition
that makes you different
from everybody else around you
you have no codes you have no clue
you have no
tools to to understand
So you have to create your own
It is totally different
And being repressed and oppressed
because of that condition
because my condition is not
that I am magical
You know that I have a superpower
My condition meant when I was little that
I was never going to be a beautiful woman
And that in itself meant that
I was never going to be loved
It really made me question everything
everything
Sometimes silence
is enforced from outside
Sometimes it's not about being myself
but about not being it
Sometimes I reproduce
the imposition of silence
for myself
Like I don't speak
when I should speak
How many times have I not said
what was important to say?
Or have I not defended myself when
I could have or should have
Because I'm afraid precisely
so there are different aspects of silence
depending on where it comes from
Does it come from inside out?
Does it come from outside in?
Is it totally interiorized
It's embedded in my body
This place and its structures
are part of my bodily memory
and it's something that I need
The hills where I can see nature
or landscapes
the sky, the beaches
where I can pick up material
and everything that is Nicaragua
I feel I belong to it