Artist Statement — Unos Cuantos Piquetitos (A Few Small Nips)
Unos Cuantos Piquetitos is a body of work developed through archival research, feminist critique, and material intervention. Working with found black-and-white photographs of anonymous Spanish women, I engage with intimate, postcard-sized portraits that have been severed from their original family archives. Once personal heirlooms, these images now circulate as displaced objects, prompting unsettling questions about loss, erasure, and historical rupture. How did these women’s images become detached from their identities? What conditions of war, repression, or silence rendered them surplus to memory?
Over these fragile photographic surfaces, I embroider improvised red-silk costumes inspired by the folkloric aesthetics of Coros y Danzas—a cultural programme mobilised by the Franco regime and the Sección Femenina to construct and enforce an idealised model of Spanish womanhood. While these traditional costumes were presented as celebratory expressions of national identity, they functioned as tools of ideological discipline, uniting and regulating women’s bodies while masking the violence of the post–Spanish Civil War period. My stitched costumes are deliberately fractured and inauthentic, parodying these folkloric forms to expose how tradition was appropriated and instrumentalised as propaganda.
The act of stitching operates as both method and metaphor. Sewing, long positioned as women’s domestic labour and a marker of moral virtue, becomes here a feminist strategy of resistance. The piercing of silk thread through photographic paper performs a dual gesture: it wounds and adorns simultaneously. Red thread signifies blood, survival, and endurance, while also referencing the decorative embellishment found in embroidered souvenir postcards popular in early twentieth-century Spain. In these works, wounds become embellishments and embellishments become wounds, refusing the historical impulse to beautify or obscure violence.
The small scale of the images demands intimacy. Unlike monumental representations of history, these works invite close looking, drawing viewers into a quiet encounter with women whose lives unfolded under conditions of constraint, surveillance, and silencing. Loose, incomplete stitching echoes the social rupture that followed women’s brief attainment of suffrage during the Second Spanish Republic, before those freedoms were violently rescinded under dictatorship.
Unos Cuantos Piquetitos also reflects my own diasporic relationship to Spanish culture. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theorisation of cultural identity as unstable and continually reproduced, the work acknowledges the impossibility of accessing an unbroken or “authentic” past. Instead, these altered portraits inhabit a space of contradiction—between belonging and estrangement, reverence and critique. Through embroidery, I reclaim a gendered practice historically used to regulate women’s roles, transforming it into a means of exposing erasure, reclaiming agency, and insisting that these lives, once obscured, can no longer be neatly stitched over or forgotten.
Eva Fernandez 2026
