Hijadelacoca
Hijadelacoca is the daughter of an immigrant who was born in Lima, Peru, during the hard times under the dictatorship of Fujimori and is currently based in one of the largest and most heavily populated districts of San Juan de Lurigancho.
She renders her unique artistic practice in textile sculptures which function as a critical response to imbalanced socio-political issues with an emphasis on exploring femininity. Influenced by Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, Hija’s soft and feminine works of fibre, textiles, and embroidery transcend the constraints of materiality and act as powerful visual testimonies in response to power politics.
“I allow myself to use the visual material as a way to explain a non-verbalized event.”
About:
Hija studied Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at the National School of Fine Arts in Lima. She started her artistic production between 2017 to 2018 through the creation of textile sculptures with a motif of feminism and explored the possibilities of fibre beyond its conventional application of embroidery. Her Por Juana Mendoza series criticises hazardous murders of women, whilst Nymphs of MRKH presents various scopes of the female body and organisms, and the Censored Embroidery series leverages embroidery to mimic the effect of censoring nudity on social media.
Hija recently finished her artist residency at the Brazilian platform BICA PLATAFORMA, where she created a series of textile sculptures titled Women Sustain the Pandemic: If There's No Food, There Isn´t Life which critically pronounces the social stance of women and housewives within the community during the Covid-19 lockdown. The protagonists of this series of works are indigenous Latino-American women who acted as unpaid domestic labourers, industriously and endlessly working in the kitchen, household, and community to sustain the livelihood during the lockdown caused by the pandemic of Covid-19. As the title suggests, if there’s no food, there’s no life.
As mothers, daughters, and sisters, mothers shoulder the responsibility of taking care of family members and working in domestic spaces in the home, kitchen, and other places associated with motherhood and maternity. Hija reveals the social divide between how women are portrayed as individuals whose places are merely within the confines of the home, their marriage, and motherhood, and their roles as domestic free labours. The subject-object relationship in Hija’s textile works goes beyond the utility function of the objects themselves, acting as an extension of women’s maternal position in society–to protect, feed, and care for the entire family.
Hijadelacoca, Series: Women Sustain the Pandemic, 2021. Textile sculpture.
Hijadelacoca, Series: Women Sustain the Pandemic, 2021. Textile sculpture.
Hijadelacoca, Series: Women Sustain the Pandemic, 2021. Textile sculpture.
Hija’s photographic works with embroidery challenge the objectification of physical bodies under the visual hegemony of opposing nudity on social media platforms. The bodies are detached from their original surroundings and placed within domestic and feminine contexts with the adoption of textiles, creating a sense of surreal atmosphere.
Hijadelacoca, Blue, 2018. Digital collage, 15 x 7 cm.
Most recently, two of Hija’s images created as part of Women Sustain the Pandemic are included in PhotoVogue, Italia.
Residencies
2022
Current Embroidery Residency at Hotel Inminente with Constanza Ruibal, Curated by Cairo Elio,Córdoba, Argentina.
2021
Art Residency Web Residência #03 at Bica Plataforma with Mediação, Bianca Bernardo, Brazil.
Art Project Male Drawing Studies Sponsored by NDYWF Art, NL.
Residency Artistres_ Sponsored by WET Productions and Wet Dove Tail Gallery, London, UK.
Selected Exhibitions
2022
Women Sustain the Pandemic Part of Manda Fotos de Agora, Art Residency Sponsored by Bica Plataforma, Brazil.
2021
Openning Web Occupancy, Web Residência #03 “Women sustain the pandemic: hijadelacoca” at Bica Plataforma, Brazil.
“When Third World War Ended” part of My Love is Your Love exhibition, The Copeland Gallery, London, UK.
London Opening Reception, The Copeland Gallery, London, UK.
“I've always been a lonely person, but now that you're gone I feel lonely” and Group Show “La Mirada” Cuir (queer) Edition at Grid Gallery, MAC Panamá (Museum of Contemporary Art), Panamá.
“Por Juana Mendoza” and “Censored Embroidery” at M.A.M.I. Musea, by Coding Rights.
Danni Han
Emerging Artists Co-Editor, MADE IN BED