The cry of silence
For me, words have always been more tangible than the objects of memory themselves. Words spoken verbally empty themselves and transmute. What is written is. I close my eyes and see words. I try to transform them into objects, thoughts, images... I cannot translate them.
I have always found pertinent and admirable the female artistic expressions made from personal experiences with patriarchal violence, but I never imagined that I would be one of these artists. I decided to break my silence.
With words and phrases embroidered on non-traditional surfaces, the work is grounded in the author's personal experiences as a woman in a patriarchal society. The narrative contextualizes - in a dialogic and artivist way - the traumatic events, starting from objects that were present in the episodes. The trauma is approached from a figurative point of view, without attempting a literal translation of the events, but rather allowing the construction of perception and meanings by the viewer.
Luísa Leão is a PhD student in Media Arts at the University of Beira Interior (UBI). She has a BA and a MA in Fashion Design from UBI, a period that included academic mobility at the Polytechnic Institute of Milan and the Federal University of Ceará. She has researches in the area of Design for Sustainability, handmade culture and Textile Art, and her PhD aims to deepen her investigations on contemporary embroidery in dialogue with cyberculture and temporality. Provides teaching support for the curricular units Creative Textiles Laboratory for the degree in Fashion Design, Semiotics of Visual Arts for the master in Multimedia Design and Contemporary Art Movements for the degree in Cinema. She is a volunteer at Coolabora CRL, a social intervention cooperative. She mentors embroidery workshops.
