The knots that we untie together brings us closer to the voices of five women from Costa Rica, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and Chile reflecting on the emotional knots associated with their personal migrant experiences. As a result of participating in the women’s circles organized by the artist, a space for conversation enabled them to release and put into words their knots, via the process of emotional awakening and confrontation.

This sound installation centers on a massive body of harbor rope arranged in the space. The rope starts on the floor with knots tied into it and then spirals in on itself, forming a pile. Headphones are placed around the spiral, suggesting the way a women’s circle works – a gathering in a circle as a space of trust, where women can express themselves, share, and support each other by navigating their feelings.

This work aims to generate empathy and visibility to the processes, experiences, and emotional dimensions of migrants in foreign countries, emphasizing the displacement of emotions and meanings that are experienced in this process. Hence, the poetic approach to the knot is represented as tension or emotional repression encompassed throughout the physical body -, as something tense, that is knotted and needs to be released, untied, and spoken.

To untie these metaphorical knots, I invited 5 women from Latin America to participate in Women’s Circles that took part in Circa106 – to establish a space of trust to talk about the emotions that belong to the migratory processes. By gathering in a group of only women who have lived similar experiences, it is possible to find and accept these emotions, which travel through different subjective experiences of the participants.

Women’s circles, briefly, are women’s organizations whose intention is the transformation of women and their social roles by reflecting on what is understood and embodied as feminine. The circles are based on the personal experience of each participant, creating a support network. Participating in a women’s circle and knowing or listening to the stories of other women brings an opportunity for self-knowledge and emotional healing at a collective level. It is an opportunity to mirror and put oneself in the place of the other, reconnecting and reflecting as a group the place of women in society.

The project was inspired by the Khipu, an Andean object and accounting system that caught my interest because of its quality as a “message carrier” that traveled throughout the Inca territory. The interesting thing about this object was that it kept information (whether numbers or stories) under a complex system of knots and strings, and that, unfortunately, the khipu did not survive colonization and its associated conflicts of power, ideology, and religion. For this reason, it deserves to be recognized in the present.

I connected the stories of Latin American migrant women to the Khipu, in an attempt to give their migration new meaning through the khipu’s original and ancestral Andean wisdom. By accepting and integrating one’s indigenous roots as part of oneself, one may be able to reaffirm one’s identity amidst the struggles of migration. For the women I worked with, it is important to recognize their roots as something that was taken away, that the spanish colonization tried to eliminate. In the same way, they also lost an indigenous, feminine cosmovision of life that they once possessed. This is a loss that is especially affecting in the bodies of indigenous women.

To emigrate is to assume an uncertain identity forever. Even if you return one day to your country of origin, you will never feel part of it. That is why it is important to look at the past and recognize what was there -, to generate solidity to our roots. This can generate an internal conflict with who you are, especially when you change cultural territory and mentality; that is why your roots of origin have to be strong and stable to be able to open yourself to new paths and cultures.

Amidst the emotional intensity of leaving, our homes and support networks become the refuge that shelters us when we face an unknown world in which we are forced to reinvent ourselves. Physical and emotional relocation affects our perception of the permanent, revealing how everything can change suddenly and the fragility of collective identity, to the point that memories of our place of origin often become an act of resistance.

The sound installation starts with knots on the floor and ends in a pile of ropes, one on top of the other, which figuratively represents the moment where these emotional knots of the participants have been untied through the spoken word and can now be heard in the headphones that surround the pile of circles with the voices of the women’s circle.

The audio/voices propose an approach that explores the emotional dimension of migration – the union in exploring – together – the subjective dimensions that define this form of mobility. Together, the audience and the subjects of the work reflect the emotions that are experienced and expressed in different stages of the migratory cycle and analyze the way in which origin and identity become as a collective emotions, impacting the one’s community of origin and one’s life as a migrant coming from Latin America.