Installation: textile, archive and audio
gr. ἀποτρόπαιος apotrópaios ‘that drives away evil’ and -aic.
- adj. p. us. Said of a rite, of a sacrifice, of a formula, etc.:
Which, because of its magical character, is believed to ward off evil or propitiate good.
The apotropaic effect is a phase of the genealogical memory project of the same name, which Laura Fjäder has been working on since 2021. By recording the life stories and biographical accounts of the Herrero branch (the author’s maternal branch), materials from the visual archive owned by the family, as well as other public and private sources, the project aims to safeguard the cultural and symbolic heritage of these women from the early 20th century to the present day – from María Concepción Argentina to her great-granddaughter, whom she did not know. The documentary purpose serves not only to preserve these memories, but also to analyse the impact of the women’s contributions and work (inside and outside the private space), their relationship with the changing industrial/urban landscape of the Cuenca del Nalón (Sotrondio and L’Entregu) and the socio-cultural environment and the construction of neighbourhood sorority networks.
The piece is articulated around the central axis of the textile intervention in material recovered from the family trousseau. It thus becomes a place of intergenerational encounter through a common protagonist element: a house which, since the great-grandmother, all the women in the family have learned to draw and which the embroidery reproduces in each of its versions, being as faithful as possible to the differences in stroke, faults in execution and colour.
The associative metaphor generates a sense of poetry expanded as surface, of embroidery as syntax, reoccupying spaces of the symbolic to preserve memory through an experience of aesthetic observation.
Memory is a form of architecture.
Louise Bourgeois
