Ofrenda (detail) Knitting, ceramic, and steel, 2023, 118” x 118” x 40”, Project: Parir los pétalos
ROMINA CHULS
Artist Statement
I’ve always been gripped by archives that represent ideals for multi-ontological futures, by those stories that exist como secretos, rooted in the Global South.
While examining family photographs, cartographic drawings, ultrasounds, and currently, pre-Hispanic iconography through feminist and queer reproductive thought, I envision anti-colonial images made from fluids, land, embryos, and morphing bodies. Textiles and ceramics play a central role in my sculptures and installations, abstracting the body and referencing the earth’s texture. Both are territories of colonization and extractivism in Latin America. My work addresses postcolonial gender issues a través de erotismo y alegoría, while also being a result of externalizing my pain and my grief as part of my spiritual practice. Topics related to androcentric memory, gender violence, and sexual and reproductive practices become visible in red, purple, brown, and gray threads.
My main medium is cross-knit looping, a needle-knitting method used by pre-Hispanic Nasca and Paracas cultures to decorate funerary mantles. Its looped structure resembles that produced by domestic knitting machines, which are also present in my work. Their combination suggests a dialogue between two practices, one that invents the world outside Western systems and one that relates to the role of care ascribed to women in patriarchal societies.
For the past five years, I’ve imagined a narrative of abortion as a crucial element in a collective consisting of humans, animals, plants, land, spirits, and technologies. Informed by a study of pre-Columbian textiles and ceramics, abortion is reframed as interdependence and pleasure. This work series aims to portray healing instruments that problematize the criminalization of abortion while also denouncing obstetric violence and calling for fostering medical procedures informados en la ternura.