Bárbara Miñarro: We Were Always Here

My work deals with a body in migration. The departure from my home in Mexico to the United States has shaped the way I navigate and adapt to new surroundings. Through the use of fabric I abstract the way my culture, language, and body conform to these environments through practices of displacement, tension, confinement, and repetition.

I work with textiles and fabrics that are personal to me. My grandmother’s bed sheets, my mother’s clothing, my own garments, and additional collected materials act as signifiers of identity that I have brought with me from my homeland. In recent projects, I have incorporated clothing from other women important to me today, resulting in a tapestry of fabrics from both nations, both homes, and both lives, all of which becomes personified into one work.  I reclaim these objects that once epitomized nostalgic memories into distorted limb-like forms. This process of transformation blurs the perimeter of characteristics that identify me. In extracting these objects from their native environment and adapting them to their new surroundings they come to symbolize my immigrant experience. As the context of my materials is changed by their placement in a new location, they explore the idea that environments can affect identities, dictate relationships, and change the way that bodies navigate through familial spaces and abstract borders.