Mujeres (in)visibles – Emakume ikus(ezinak)gaiak

When I was rummaging through old books at a flea market this summer and found one dedicated to the Invisible Women in the political and cultural sphere in Spain, everything was turned upside down in my mind.

The subject was of course already a part of me, but reading about their lives and how they were undervalued at the time made me want to give them a voice. Not only to these Spanish women, but to the many women in other countries.

This led me to look first into culture, the field to which I am most attuned, and later into the sciences, politics, sport ….. Names and more names began to emerge of women who are still being fought for today so that they are finally recognised in their respective fields.

My head filled with stories, data, facts, injustices….

It was then that my dream of bringing them to life, in my own way, with my collages, arose.

I filled notebooks with their lives, their works, their discoveries, their achievements. And then it dawned on me: what about the women who have suffered this invisibility but within the privacy of their homes, their low-paid jobs, their unflattering environments?

And it was then that I looked into the women who were part of my family, my mother’s family, because they were the ones I lived with. Spectacular women, who in their small worlds, fought bravely to move their families and their businesses forward, often giving up their dreams and their own lives.

This is how the idea for this project came about. I want to portray some of them and others. Those who had a name and those who did not. Those who, although late, are beginning to be recognised and those who will never be recognised because they only live in the memory of those of us who have known them and their “memory will be erased like tears in the rain”, as Nexus 6 said in Blade Runner, referring to memories.

Mai Ferreira