Anónimas / Ximena Zomosa
 

The wardrobe, depending on the body that wears it, becomes imaginary; it is a symbolic device that carries the history of the world to inhabit it. Ximena Zomosa has installed a tour of 12 textile ensembles associated with the bodies of women, their chores and experiences addressing domestic and salaried work. In the tour, among others, the image of the working woman, the schoolgirl, the Mapuche woman and the Goddess of Water are captured.

Anónimas gives an account of the large-scale textile collection that the artist has produced since 1997 and that today, in dialogue with current problems and reflections, intersects with various feminist gender readings. Installing in both public and private space, Zomosa’s retrospective engages in a dialogue with the discussions that arose at the turn of the century regarding the censorship and prohibition of women in the occupation of said public space.

The garments exhibited consider the monumentality of their proportions to express the overflow of the domestic, recalling stories, dream scenes, the maternal image, the grandmother's dress, the house and the garden, patterned flowers that represent women in many parts of the world . Anónimas puts in tension the symbolic image of the sacred and unattainable woman: the saint and the protector, roles intrinsic to women under the patriarchal lens; an ode to the, hopefully silent, reproduction of the domestic. The critical reading of the artist is clear and is expressed, for example, through the dress of an employee, understood as a model of international uniform derived from the various processes of colonization and the invisibility of the conditions of service and subordination that these women have lived as a historical experience. On the other hand, the jumper stops referring only to the school uniform, becoming a political reference, in that critical, revolutionary "pingüina" that mobilizes essential social processes.

Anónimas also exhibits Processions, an audiovisual record of the work in the public space and culminates, on the one hand, with the textile representation of the Papay, the woman who has lived the Mapuche experience, expressing her constant political and social struggle throughout the centuries; in addition to making visible and articulating with the image of the horticulturist and the woman of rural work. On the other hand, the Goddess of Water illustrates the constant activist character of the exhibition, with a nod towards ecofeminism, linking the feminist struggle with the defense of our territories, and in particular, with the fight for the right to water that we are currently facing in our country.

​

Anónimas is an invitation to recognize ourselves in our ancestors and in their feminine power, or rather, in their protective feminist power; to observe and think about the construction of the image of women from everyday but significant elements, installed in the bodies of girls and women on a local and global scale; to link ourselves from the art and from the textile with an activist and feminist political perspective.

​

LASTESIS Collective
March 2021