"The works are part of a larger series exploring connections between language, borders, and the choreographies of migrant labor. It takes as a starting point the poetry of Bolivian feminist writer Adela Zamudio, particularly her long narrative poem ‘Loca de Hierro’ (Iron Mad Woman), which tells the story of a seamstress who endures displacement, isolation and industrious, repetitive manual labor. The textile work is developed in collaboration with the Brazil-based Bolivian seamstress Stephany Quispe.
The textile and the installation explore translation not as just a linguistic operation, but a corporeal and material reinvention. Composed of elements in copper, steel, and iron, the sculptural installation materially associates with the infrastructures of industrial labor in its most malleable form. The poem is translated into patterns, gestures, colors, and embroidered stitches, tracing open-ended maps and imagined geographies. Drawings with iron dust on a steel plate appears as path of an incomplete, fragmented language. It is at the same time a tactile, cryptic and territorial script. The two physical works, are accompanied by a poem where Zamudio’s text has been intersected with contemporary histories of the loneliness of migrant workers."
Poem written in collaboration with Patricia Carolina.
