Vivas como flores de tierra seca

Our uniqueness is echoed in an intimate universality.

Project

Walking on the dry land of a desert, the sedimentary strata that carry each of our steps, genealogy.
Like the earth, we are made of strata.

Observing the desert flowers, a mystery comes to caress the mind: where they get the water they need to live? Despite the dryness of the soil, they find the strength to grow in the heart of sedimentary strata. I love their discreet, strong and humble beauty, which evokes a sense of marginality and solitude.
I feel close to them.

What the skin hides, what the skin keeps, in its epidermal layers, in its cells.
This series presents the portraits of 18 women from Mexico, Spain, France, Costa Rica and Argentina using photography and poetry.
Portraits of my female friends and I, from trust and intimacy. Portraits of our skins memories, our stories, suggesting our bodies territories - contrast.
Women and lands have in common a figure that dominates them. We see their bodies, our bodies, associated with sensuality, objectified, exoticized, romanticized, aestheticized, bodies that don't seem to belong to us.
Some have had abortions, some have been sexually abused, some are survivors, some have migrated.
Each carries within her a secret world, a loneliness, an almost intrinsic grief, the postures of our bodies silently telling our stories.
We strive for the freedom of our bodies, the freedom of our hearts and the freedom to love and be our-selves as much as possible, according to our own rules.
Our uniqueness is echoed in an intimate universality.
These photographs and poems together forming a series, show the link that connects us organically, like invisible, rhizomatic roots, from one continent to another, through our souls, through our histories.
These roots run through all the strata of the earth and connect all women. Alive, like flowers in dry land.

Poems are originally in Spanish

1 - Self-portrait, Mediterranean Sea, Andalucía, España
Inhabit the Earth
Inhabit my body, my life and my being ... present
Da-sein
Without Heidegger
But, with flowers and sea

Healing process
Female lineage
Inherited wounds
Own life injuries due to familiar habits - and society

Mistreatment
Invisibilization
Sexual abuse
Abortion

My voice is silent
Accept
Feeling I deserved it
As a validated certainty

Rediscover the sound of my throat - sung
Being myself free from traumatic postures
To be one with the rock - my skin
Feel the wind caress my whole body from all kindly landscapes

2 - Carmen, Velez Blanco, Andalucía, España
Rock flesh
The blood of this land flows into the wine that the local people drink
The blood into the blood that tastes like the mountains
The wind caresses the rock and seems to have made it grow

3 - Daviña, Cabo Cope, Murcia, España
We went to the sea
Flesh and bones
Alive like flowers of dry land
Without any religion, conservative morals or stalking eyes on our bodies
We went to the sea
Eating vegetables cleaned with the water of the sea itself
And swimming free
Simplemente

4 - Pauline, Clermont-le-Fort, France
The sensitive sweetness of fragility becoming strength

5 - Sylvana/Virginie, Luz, France
Sand rock water flesh
The soul experienced and wise
The heart faithful to the one who gives him his own
Powerful hair and soft skin
Resistant as leather
A life of 1000 lives
In a second we became soul mates
Sensitive, brave, loving and fragile heart
Loving free wild woman
A tender skin seeming more resistant than rock
Beneath which flows a blood full of pure water
Heart vibrating
The sandy skin
Exiled heart
Seeks its home

6 - Hannah, From France/Tunisia to Barcelona, Cataluña, España
Many lands under the skin
Absences presences game as clothing
Take time to read a book on a beach
Forget the ghosts of many pasts and realities
The body at one with the warm sand
The tender intimacy of self-heed

7 - Marion, From France/Vietnam to La Taha, La Alpurraja, España
The bare skin lying on the wet ground on the banks of the acequia
The feet in the cold water of the mountain that cleanses and hydrates the inhabiting bodies
A free skin - freeing itself - from the family lineage
A distant war in Asia and an exile flows through her veins
The skin dressed - urticaria, expressed to protect itself
And the feminine, hidden under the skin, now wants to embody
Outsou becomes Marion again
To be the daughter-of another way
To be herself first and foremost - emancipated from family rules
and of loyalty towards the struggle

8 - Laura, Tarn River, France
Floating
Forgetting the weight of the body
Deaf to the chaos outside
Filled with inner sounds
Breath in the throat
The heart beating in the chest / Alive - Vibrating
Floating soul
There are no decisions to make
Only breath
And float
The circles in the water like heartbeat marks
Long live - for having survived
Alive, like a miracle
Long live - for having fought
Alive, like a flower of dry land

9 - Irina, La Taha, España
Mature body
Shiny
Damaged lineage
But inhabit the world dancing
Powerful as the mountain
And in the meantime
For a second
To abandon the having to be
To embrace all of ourselves
Out of time
Out of age
An intimate rest
Carrying all that is silenced

10 - Lucía, chamomile flower, Zújar, España
The smoke of chamomile mixed with tobacco
Smells of light and life
Covering everything with dried flowers
Surpassing survival
Change resilience for Ginkgo Biloba
Traveling the world in a minivan
La Dragona becomes home
The forest gets alter ego
From the desert to the glaciers
Crossing and passing through cities
Whether smoke, vapor or effluvium
The scent of chamomile is named Lucía

11 - Lis, Tijuana, Baja California, México
Facing the sea, mute witness of the fabricated borders
Facing the sea, mute witness of the iron wall
Facing the sea, contemplating (his) absence's infinity

12 - Pepa, Cabo Cope, Murcia, España
Return to the land of birth after years outside
How many skins have been molted since the leave-taking?
Naked as a sprouting seed, there is only one free body left on a land looking at a horizon rich in promise - in any case, in imagination's possibilities

13 - Julia, a San Louis Potosí desert's flower in Barcelona, Cataluña, España
As little girls, they already sexualized us by wearing swimsuits covering our breasts
When our breasts were the same as boys'
They imposed on us the role of universal caregivers/mothers by putting dolls in our arms - and giving us to keep the brothers and sisters, sometimes even our own parents
When we just wanted to play naked with the stones and the waves on the seashore

14 - Daniela, From Mexico to Barcelona, Cataluña, España
Choose your land of refuge
Fleeing the land threatens
The strength and courage of exile
Live the heart in safety
Fleeing a country that threatens the lives of women
-
"«Forced Displacement» read the file.

Then I was no longer a woman: I had turned me into a number.
It is the easiest way, to put it kindly, in which the system has managed to
accommodate its guilt: by the hundreds, by the thousands.
What is not read in those documents are our lives: the stories of which we are uprooted from our land simplified into a statistic.
We don’t archive grief: how painful it is to leave behind your family, your home, your community, life as you know it.
Those numbers, those papers do not speak of how the hours and their disuse fall short. Which means starting over again with suitcases in tow, with your heart in your hand, with fear as a shield and melancholy tattooed on your skin.
Who counts the tears and sleeplessness? The abandoned dreams, the
absences in everyday life, the plate eternally placed on a table that will not be filled? Who counts the lives behind those numbers?
That life that is torn from us because in Mexico a woman always runs the risk of waking up turned into a number, in a dusty folder in the pile of grief." ©Daniela Valdez

15 - Adriana* y Lucía, *From Costa Rica, Zújar, Granada, España
Sulphur, mud, desert
Wash bodies and souls - naked
Free water of social duties
Free water of documents
Free water of female gender
The smell of the devil embracing blue
The warmth that makes free, for a moment - present

16 - Sheila, La Taha, La Alpujarra, España
In the heart of the isolated heights
Lying on the dry rock - surrounded by wild thyme
The body embraced by the Land heated by the sun
Comes for a moment to calm
The uterine pain - of the blood that takes the fertility of the month of March

17 - Sole, From Argentina to San Pancho, Nayarit, México
Playing in the sand, the skin born on another land
A back that hides the belly that had to aborted
Time passes
Wounds heal
The maturing body finally becoming free and wild like childhood

18 - Lucía, From Spain to Brighton, UK
The wisdom of the Earth
The force of the sea
The shadow will never stop the light from shining