Text by Virginia Vigliar

We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn. We are those who unite in underground systems to grow flowers from your oppression, we are the ones who demand a change that grows roots where yours rotted. We are the women who make a poem out of imagination, we are the fighters, the organizers, the ones who get shot in the head for planting trees. We are the women whose bodies we had to learn to love, we are our curves, our scars and our efforts. We are the women who lit the smoke of our magic inside your walls, and found the spirited women that lived inside of us; the oppressed, mistreated, invaded. We are the women whose nipples are blurred, whose bodies are tender poems and battlefields. We are those who found ancestral pain pressing against our bones, paralysed, then offered movement by our sisters. We are the ones who recognise our individuality, as you call us someone’s daughter, sister or mother. We are the silenced, voiceless, we are those who won battles and shouted under the sea. We are the fire tfire that burns as we try to strip ourselves of our own limits. We are the ones who own our names. We are the blinded who caught sight on the way to your hell, we are awake now. Despiertas, Sveglie, Wach, ξύπνιες, бодрствовать, مستيقظ, Despertas.

In Mexico, 11 women are killed every day, it is one of the countries with the highest femicide rates, women’s bodies have become the battle ground of the machismo, corruption, and inequality that governs the country. In response to the femicides all over the country, the graphic campaign Vivas Nos Queremos started in 2014 by the group the group Mujeres Grabando Resistencias (MUGRE). MUGRE was formed in 2013 at the Escuela de Cultura Popular Mártires del 68 in Mexico City and is made up of women who use printmaking as a form of protest and social change in the face of gender violence.

Vivas Nos Queremos (#vivasnosqueremos) means “We want ourselves alive”, the campaign started with the intention of expressing with images and writing, what women’s bodies go through every day, and is enunciated in the first person inviting women to be able to gain agency and identity in the struggle. The campaign has spread to various countries, with the loudest echo in Argentina, where Vivas Nos Queremos Argentina was created, and authored the posters you see above. “The intention to multiply the campaign arrived to Argentina from the hand of militant feminist women who echoed this cry.” says Natalia Revales from #VivasNosQueremosArgentina.

The collective looks to express the rage, joy and power felt as a network of women living in a patriarchy-capitalist society, where our bodies’ freedom is as permanent as the next govermnet. We are seeing our rights taken away from us everywhere in the Western world, and must understand that our struggle is interdependent, and we can find inspiration in this work. “Our work and our search for those resonances inside and outside the country about what it means to be a woman in a world where it is not acceptable to be a woman, much less to say so, also bore and continues to bear wonderful and encouraging fruits” Mugre said. . The posters carrying the messages spread from Mexico, to Costa Rica, Spain (where I found myself shouting those same words at the women’s march), Germany, Colombia and countless other places.

“Many collectives or women’s groups have found, with us, a weapon in graphics.” MUGRE

Because we are not afraid, we gather. This poster portrays unity and the right of women to gather and demand their rights.

CREDIT: Campaña Gráfica Vivas Nos Queremos Argentina.
Instagram @vivasnosqueremos.argentina
Enlargements on offset newsprint on woodcut base, 58 x 82 cm.

Bio

Virginia is a feminist writer, culture critic and editor. Her writing questions, and reflects on, the social paradigms currently in place through an approach centred on the emotional and spiritual as well as on the political and logical.

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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vivivigliar/